The Basement: Joshua Cutchin | Fairies, Bigfoot, and the Connection Nobody Saw Coming

Summary

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The Why Files: Operation Podcast

Episode: The Basement: Joshua Cutchin | Fairies, Bigfoot, and the Connection Nobody Saw Coming
Date: June 8, 2026
Host: The Why Files
Guest: Joshua Cutchin

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Overview

In this riveting, densely packed episode, The Why Files hosts paranormal author and researcher Joshua Cutchin for a journey through the uncanny links connecting fairies, Bigfoot, UFOs, death, and the borderlands of reality and fiction. Cutchin shares the core thesis from his sprawling work, Ecology of Souls, arguing that the paranormal—UFOs, cryptids, near-death experiences, and spirit lore—are interconnected aspects of a single, death-centered phenomenon that wears many cultural masks.

The conversation flows from Cutchin's personal journey and experiences (including addiction and synchronicities), through deep dives into folklore, the psychology of archetypes, food taboos, smells in paranormal events, and the eerie way fiction sometimes manifests in reality. Along the way, they explore why our collective narrative—and our comfort with ambiguity—may matter more than physical proof. The tone is fun, generous, and intellectually engaged, moving between scholarship, personal testimony, and playful banter.

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Key Themes and Discussion Points

1. Who is Joshua Cutchin?

• Background & Introduction ([01:18])
  • Classically trained tuba player, musicologist, and author.
  • Grew up in a supportive, curious, Christian North Carolina household open to paranormal topics.
  • First fascination: Bigfoot; came to UFOs and "high strangeness" later.
  • Approach: Deep research, embracing the "outsider everywhere" identity as a tuba player in UFO circles and vice versa.

"I've always kind of been befuddled by people who say, 'I grew up in a conservative Christian household and we weren't allowed to talk about ghosts or anything strange or supernatural.' And I grew up in a household that pretty much acknowledged the fact that the Bible is the most paranormal book ever written." — Joshua Cutchin ([04:04])

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2. Bigfoot as Archetype & Liminal Entity

• Bigfoot’s appeal ([05:20]): Not just a missing link, but an archetypal "wild man," symbolizing humanity’s estrangement from nature and liminality ("the edge of town").
• On the Patterson-Gimlin film ([07:33]): Iconic either as "proof or a hoax that lasted 60 years."
• Paranormal Bigfoot: Cutchin and collaborator Timothy Renner propose Bigfoot is less a zoological animal and more a supernatural, trickster-like presence—changing masks and leaving liminal traces.

"Bigfoot has become an avatar for that part of ourselves that really wants to go back to the forest." — Cutchin ([06:57])

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3. Formative Experiences: Synchronicities and Sobriety

• Honeymoon Bigfoot story ([13:27]): A mysterious rock left behind his car after a drunken night calling out for Bigfoot—interpreted as a possible "Sasquatch adjacent" message or invitation.
• Addiction & Recovery ([16:09]): Personal death-rebirth narrative, marked by meaningful synchronicities (e.g., entering rehab on Saint Moses’s feast day, therapist linked to Mothman lore).
• Synchronicities as markers: Parental decisions, book references (Aesop's Fables), and creative work as recurring motifs.

"It was the feast day of St. Moses... one of the desert fathers who lived a life as a brigand until his sudden and instantaneous 180 conversion, which had some significance to me." — Cutchin ([18:43])

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4. Patterns in the Paranormal: Food, Smell, and Trickster

A. Food Taboos Across Cultures ([38:16])

• In fairy lore, eating or drinking in the otherworld means entrapment; the same taboo appears in indigenous Bigfoot legends and spreads to UFO abduction lore.
• Alien abductions: Pills, ointments as "food"—initiation into otherness with life-altering consequences.

"It's right out of Western European fairy folklore…if you take food in fairyland, you're trapped with the fairies forever. But Alaska's kind of far from Ireland." — Cutchin ([28:46])

B. Paranormal Smells: Brimstone, Roses, and the Senses ([53:29])

• Sulfur/ozone: Common in classic UFO, spiritual, and demonic encounters—misunderstood over centuries.
• Smells as deeply emotional, non-rational cues—"the one sense that bypasses thalmic altogether, goes directly to the amygdala."
• Manipulative aspect: The phenomenon ‘choosing’ how it will be perceived (good/evil, familiar/uncanny).

"If the phenomenon can control how it's seen and how it presumably smells, like what a smell to choose." — Cutchin ([60:08])

C. The Trickster as Governing Archetype ([73:24])

• George P. Hansen’s theory: The ‘trickster’ archetype—liminality, boundaries, chaos—governs all paranormal phenomena.
• Attempting to study or pin down such phenomena guarantees elusiveness and paradox.

"It's rehab... What it does is it fulfills this necessary role... the trickster archetype loves to self negate..." — Cutchin ([75:06])

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5. Death, Thresholds & the Ecology of Souls

• Central Thesis: All paranormal phenomena represent contact with threshold states—especially death. UFO encounters, shamanic initiations, fairy abductions, near-death experiences, and even high-dose psychedelic trips are all symbolic (or literal) crossings into the ‘other world.’
• Supporting Evidence:
  • Widespread archetypes: tunnels, dismemberment and reassembly, “consuming the god,” and the return with new powers (clairvoyance, poltergeist activity).
  • The fairy = the dead concept, heavenly inversions, burial mounds as fairy sites.

"I think that the death keeps on cropping up because we're kind of misinterpreting what that moment is, what that NDE moment is. I just think it's one expression of these threshold moments." — Cutchin ([79:24])

• On Near-Death, Reincarnation, and Identity:
  • The afterlife as a river returning to the sea, where identity may dissolve, only to be “precipitated” again in new forms (water cycle analogy).
  • Reincarnation research and skepticism—the “soul group” model, and why certain people just click.

"Why wouldn't it be birth instead?... there is inversion, fairies would laugh at funerals and cry at births." — Interviewer/Cutchin ([90:19])

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6. Shifting Paradigms: UFOs, Disclosure, and Cultural Narratives

• On "Disclosure": The New York Times 2017 article pivoted the UFO conversation back toward "nuts and bolts" (craft, propulsion), sidelining spiritual and indigenous interpretations.
• Phenomenon adapts to culture: Contact narratives shift from physical craft to “downloads, astral travel, lights in the sky.”
• Warning: The real disruptive disclosure would be the acknowledgment that all these phenomena connect to death, consciousness, and the ‘other world.’

"It's almost as if the front-facing effort to get people to acknowledge UFOs is giving them the most palatable version. Here are the nutsy boltsy things. We won't quite talk about the psionics and the extended consciousness and the death connection because you want to talk about something that would really be catastrophic. Disclosure. It would be the death connection." — Cutchin ([98:37])

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7. Fiction Bleeds Into Reality: Fourth Wall Phantoms

• Authors meet their characters ([111:22]): Writers and creatives often report characters "taking on life," sometimes even manifesting physically (Alan Moore’s John Constantine, Alice Walker’s characters).
• Retrocausality vs. Manifestation: Do we dream fiction from the collective unconscious, or does fiction shape the phenomenon (“mass formation poltergeist events”)?
• The Philip Experiment: Group creates a fictional ghost and gets anomalous phenomena corresponding to its invented history.
• Tulpas, Egregores, and Theatre: Community belief and shared imagination can seemingly "create" effects, reminiscent of occult practices and magical ceremonies.

"Ideas have people... If you've ever been involved in a creative process, you know that this has happened to you at some point." — Cutchin ([120:43])

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8. AI, Goblins, and the Future of the Trickster ([147:21])

• AI as the new mask: Will AI hallucinations and generated entities become the new locus for trickster phenomena? (LLMs like ChatGPT reportedly "addicted to goblins").
• Collective narrative evolves: As culture normalizes one strangeness (e.g., flying saucers), the "phenomenon" pushes us further into the unknown—AI, tulpas, and beyond.

"Does a sufficiently complex system invite in goblins? ... Some of these large language models love bringing up goblins, even when you don't." — Cutchin ([147:47])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Living With Ambiguity ([149:06]):

"I would encourage people to be comfortable with ambiguity...with not having what my mentor, Greg Bishop, calls a certainty fetish..."

• On 'Interesting If True' ([150:17]):

"I have a big 'interesting if true' basket in my head. The true basket is small and the false basket is small. But that interesting, if true, basket is just overflowing..."

• Unprovable, Yet Valuable ([142:56]):

"Everything at the end of the day that I talk about is speculative. And I think there's so much that's rewarding in the speculation about these topics..."

• On Death and the Afterlife ([140:07]):

"I'm not sure that [not recognizing your family] is not the case now... If you look at how so many of these experiences point towards things like ego death... it does mean that points to...when you die, it is like a river going to the sea..."

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• Introduction & Personal Background ([00:00]–[05:20])
• Bigfoot & The Archetype ([05:20]–[11:50])
• On Addiction, Synchronicity, and Recovery ([13:22]–[24:02])
• Discussions on Archetypes, Jung, Time Loops, and the Trickster ([24:38]–[28:16])
• From Music to Paranormal: The Scholarly Approach ([28:16]–[34:24])
• Food Taboo in Folklore, Bigfoot, and UFO Lore ([35:34]–[43:59])
• Sulfur, Smell, and Credibility ([53:29]–[60:04])
• Trickster Theory and the Self-Negating Paranormal ([73:24]–[78:48])
• Ecology of Souls and the Death Connection ([79:00]–[96:18])
• Shifts in UFO Narrative, Disclosure, and Indigenous Perspectives ([96:27]–[99:18])
• Fiction Becoming Reality: Fourth Wall Experiences ([111:11]–[122:04])
• AI, Goblins, and Future Trickster Masks ([147:24]–[148:43])
• Closing Reflections on Uncertainty, Narrative, and Meaning ([149:06]–[151:48])

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Resources & References

• Jacques Vallee's 'Passport to Magonia': Cataloging food exchange across fairy/UFO accounts.
• Joe Simonton Pancake Case ([151:45])
• Philip Experiment: Creating a fictional ghost with documented phenomena.
• Alan Moore's John Constantine encounter: Multiple writers with similar experiences.
• George P. Hansen, 'The Trickster and the Paranormal'
• Rupert Sheldrake, Morphic Resonance
• Mario Kitness & David Lukes, DMT and altered states
• Eric Wargo, 'Time Loops,' retrocausality

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Final Words

Joshua Cutchin’s work urges listeners to embrace ambiguity over certainty, to see the interconnectedness of all high strangeness, and to value the transformative potential of our collective myths and stories—whether they be of fairies, Bigfoot, UFOs, or encounters with our own creativity. Whatever the phenomenon at the heart of it all is, it seems to specialize in meeting us at the boundary—between life and death, fact and fiction, inside and outside—and pushing us toward new stories about who we are.

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"The map is not the territory in life is firmly in that true basket. And I don't know what collective story we're telling ourselves, but there is a better story to be told, and we have to start telling it or else it's never going to happen."
— Joshua Cutchin ([150:48])

Transcript

[Host]

Today I'm talking with Joshua Cutchen, a researcher who spent the last decade building the case that every paranormal phenomenon we've ever recorded is a different facet of the same thing. UFOs, fairies, Bigfoot, ghosts, near death experiences. His book Ecology of Souls argues that all of it connects to death or

[Interviewer]

whatever's on the other side of it.

[Host]

This theory is being taken seriously by serious people. Jeffrey Kripal at Rice University teaches it to. His PhD students are not gonna like this theory. Today we're covering how he built that theory, what the fairy literature gets right that ufology keeps ignoring, and his latest book, Fourth Wall Phantoms, which is about fictional characters that cross into real life. Oh, that one's true. One day on Hollywood Boulevard, I saw Spider man, Thor, and two Spongebobs. We also talked about how ChatGPT is addicted to goblins. This is a true story.

[Interviewer]

You're gonna wanna hear it.

[Host]

After the episode, I'll do a quick breakdown of what we covered and what I can prove.

[Interviewer]

Now let's go down to the basement. Josh Kochdin is here. Welcome to the basement.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Thanks so much for having me. I'm still in shell shock. But are you? Yeah, it's just, it's, it's a lot to take in and it's always, I'm always under the assumption that people have no idea who I am. So, you know, hot dog vendor. Remember I said that earlier?

[Interviewer]

So now people in this space know who you are.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, I, I appreciate it. And it's, everybody here has been so welcoming and hospitable. So it's wonderful to be invited into this fairyland, the subterranean fairyland.

[Interviewer]

Really. Everyone's nice because you're nice. Not nice. People don't, they don't get to the studio. They just, we send them home.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Fair enough. Fair enough.

[Host]

Goodbye.

[Interviewer]

So you study tuba.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I said to my wife, I said, there's going to be an icebreaker question. I know exactly what it's going to be. It's going to be the tuba question.

[Interviewer]

Tuba under Fred Mills, Canadian brass, one of the best players of generation. He says that the tuba is underestimated as a storytelling instrument. You're a storyteller and a tuba player. Do you agree?

[Joshua Cutchen]

I would.

[Interviewer]

What are we missing?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, no, I would. So, yeah, I, I mean, we could do a whole podcast about Fred Mel stories. That was, they broke the mold with, with Fred. Yeah, I, I, I worked with Fred at the University of Georgia in the quintet setting, which, you know, if you're going to work in a brass quintet setting with Fred Mills, who was head of the Canadian Brass. That's quite a privilege. But, yeah, tuba is. It gets pigeonholed a lot as being like, you know, the jokey, farty kind of instrument.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Joshua Cutchen]

But it really has so many different types of characters that it can be, you know, there's. There's a powerful and there's a menace to it. I mean, if you go back and listen to some of those John Williams scores, you've got Jim Self playing a lot of these tracks and these themes and like Home Alone. There's a playfulness to it that's true. An impishness to it.

[Interviewer]

So I think of Peter and the Wolf.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, yeah, well. And it's just. It's. It. I think that, you know, it's kind of been an interesting journey for me because I go into the music space where I have a lot of my friends, you know, and gig because I. That's a big part of still what I do. And they're always like, so what's. What's up with the UFO thing, Josh? And then I go into the UFO space and they're like, what, the tuba? Like, where does this come? So I kind of feel like, you know, outsider everywhere.

[Interviewer]

Well, yeah, I mean, you're the jazz playing, tuba playing, UFO researcher researching alien food offerings. So how did that. What was your household like? Is the weird stuff always around?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, that's. That's a really good question, you know, and so as far as this current author journey that I'm privileged to be on, the only person in high school who really wanted me to go into music was my high school band director. Because as we were saying a little bit earlier, you know, I had always had to work at the music stuff. The writing stuff just kind of came. Tumbled out of me. But as far as my household growing up, you know, I've always kind of been befuddled by people who say, you know, I grew up in a. In a conservative Christian household and we weren't allowed to talk about ghosts or anything strange or supernatural. And I grew up in a household that pretty much acknowledged the fact that the Bible is the most paranormal book ever written. Of course. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

But was it like a heavy Christian upbringing?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, I mean, you know. Well, I mean, at the time, I didn't think so, but now in 2026, sure. You know, I don't know. Or vice versa. I just thought it was, you know, just basic North Carolina Christian home. But, yeah, there was never a hesitancy to say, like, yeah, people see strange things. You know, my father Claimed maybe this could be in your fact check. At the end of the episode, my father claimed to have subscribed to a newsletter that the BFRO had at one point. So, like, you know, so we wrote bfro, The Bigfoot. Yeah, Field Researchers Organization. So we were always talking about Bigfoot. And that really was my first love was. Was Bigfoot. So there never was a. A concerted effort to shut down these areas of inquiry, you know, and I came to the UFO question rather late because I was kind of perceiving a lot of the skeptical arguments, like why are there so many types of craft? Why are there so many different types of entities? I can believe that we're being visited by one species, but not 240. I sort of Goldilocks my way there, as is obvious from me sitting in the basement. But yeah, it was just. It was a very supportive household in terms of. Of just being curious about stuff.

[Interviewer]

So your dad, Bigfoot. You started with Bigfoot. I've got friends. They're fascinated by Bigfoot. I'm not like, my audience wants Bigfoot stories all the time. Like, really?

[Host]

The Harry Ape thing.

[Interviewer]

What is it about Bigfoot that's so awesome?

[Joshua Cutchen]

I think that.

[Interviewer]

Is he the tuba of the Cryptids? I mean, is he underappreciated?

[Joshua Cutchen]

I mean. Yeah, kind of a punchline. Yeah, I can, I can definitely see that. No, I think that part of what it is about. About Bigfoot, it's the same thing that we see when we see chimpanzees. It's like, this is so close to what we are, but not. And if Bigfoot is a rel. Primate, which I don't think it is, but if it is, you don't think he's even closer a primate? I think that. Well, I think it's more. A lot more in line with the, with the UFO thing. I think that it's a. I think that it's something that loves wearing that as a mask, you know?

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Because there's so much. There's an awfully early in the discussion to be derailed by Bigfoot, but.

[Interviewer]

Well, I mean, we'll get into Trickster.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, but. But, you know, I think that there's There is so much symbolism embedded in something like the Wildman archetype that I think that it's a great mask for this thing to call us back into Right. Relation with the environment, to remind us that the edge of town is still a precarious place. Right. And I think that, to paraphrase my co author and friend Timothy Renner, I think that the wild man archetype is still out there. And a lot of times it manifests as footprints and howls in the night. And on rare occasions, you're lucky enough to see this archetype somehow embodied. And it's kind of weird because Bigfoot's having a moment right now. It's been having a moment for the past ten years or so. We could probably go out in the parking lot across the street and find at least one car with a Bigfoot decal. It's as ubiquitous as the gray alien was in the 90s, I think. And I think that says a lot about where we are at this moment in terms of being severed from our naturalistic origins. I think it says a lot about a lot of the ecological anxieties that we see. I think it's Bigfoot has become an avatar for that part of ourselves that really wants to go back to the forest.

[Interviewer]

It's interesting that you said it on the edge of town, because I think liminality and thresholds are going to come up a lot today.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I think they tend to follow me.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. What's your take on the Patterson film?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Oh, boy. So this is the part where I make half the people mad and half the people happy.

[Interviewer]

That's the world I live in, is everyone's angry.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. I mean, I'd heard rumblings a while back that's that it wasn't everything that it was cracked up to be. I, I, I think that, look, at the end of the day, it's a remarkable bit of footage. Right. It's, it's, it's either proof of Bigfoot or it's a hoax that lasted, what, coming up on 60, 60 years. And I think either way, like, it's, it's, it's incredible and should be regarded as that way. I think that it's fascinating to me that, like, 90% of Bigfoot iconography is, is based on a possible hoax. Now, like, it's always the same post.

[Interviewer]

Yep.

[Joshua Cutchen]

But, but, yeah, I feel like the real people who lost out on this possible outing of the Patterson film as a hoax are probably the forensic analysts, because if you can't get to the bottom of this over 60 years, how foundational is this science? Right. Are we incarcerating people with the same techniques that were used to analyze the Patterson Gimlin footage?

[Interviewer]

I tried to debunk it in my Bigfoot episode. I couldn't.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, that's good. It's, it's, it's, it's great. And look, and that's, that's what a lot of my work in recent years has sort of been angling towards, is just taking the pressure off of any one of these things so that I don't have to have my entire worldview collapse if something's outed as a hoax. Right. I mean, I, I think that there are people in these communities who base their entire careers around a single bit of evidence. And then when that falls through, sometimes they're very hesitant to step forward. Someone who I will sing his praises all day is Peter Robbins. When the Rendlesham case seemed to be less than what it would appear to be, Peter said, yeah, I can't, I can't vouch for this anymore. Which is a remarkable thing for somebody in this space to do. And I wish I saw more of that decorum from the Bigfoot community.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Joshua Cutchen]

In regard to that, you don't.

[Interviewer]

And, and because Reyndlesham was a great example because I feel like that's debunked, but that people don't like hearing that.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, and here's the thing. It's like you get into these sort of both and both and both and. Right. That's, that's where, that's, that's the line that I try to tow all the time. This doesn't mean Bigfoot doesn't exist.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It means that we have a piece of evidence that isn't what it appeared to be. It's still a part of the history. I do think it's interesting to see how much of what we assumed about Bigfoot from a promotional perspective is downstream of the Patterson film.

[Interviewer]

That's true.

[Joshua Cutchen]

To this day, I will still press my copy of Jeff Muldrum, Sasquatch Legend Meets Science into people's hands if they're interested in Bigfoot. It's a great book, but from what I understand, some of the stuff about mid tarsal breaks and some of this primate anatomy stuff was based on his assessment of the Patterson film. And so for me, that's the feedback

[Interviewer]

loop that we're probably going to talk about.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, it's the feedback loop. And I just, I, I'm trying really hard not to have a certain level of schadenfreude or to sound like, you know, I told you so, or any of that stuff. But I do kind of have to smile a little bit when I think about the position that I've been occupying and that Tim Renner's been occupying. That is like, this is, this is the wild man. This is not necessarily a hominid, a primate that you can Catch and bag and tag. This is. This seems to be something older and weirder and deeper. You can find antecedents for it very clearly in the old world. And I think that as a lot of the biological stuff seems to have been built on a foundation of sand, we're going to see more acceptance of the high strangeness in Bigfoot reports. And that again, is at the heart of a lot of what I do is because I've gotten tired of seeing people be treated as sensible and foundational witnesses when they see a big monkey cross the road. But then to have their report tossed out when the end of the report is and it turned into a ball of light, like we're all living in glass houses here. This stuff is very strange. I believe in believing experiencers and in sort of like a flip of Blackstone's formulation. I'd rather. I'd rather believe nine hoaxers than to toss out one person who's generally wrestling with what they. What they saw.

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[Interviewer]

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[Interviewer]

I think that's fair. Did you ever get to the bottom of your honeymoon bigfoot story? That was.

[Joshua Cutchen]

No.

[Interviewer]

Weird story.

[Joshua Cutchen]

No, not to this. To this day, I haven't. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Can you tell us what happened? That was crazy.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. I was being a drunken idiot. Yeah. So we had gone to blue Ridge, Georgia, for our honeymoon, which is. Little did I know at the time, actually, a pretty active area for bigfoot. And I was always, as always interested in this stuff, not writing about it, not as immersed as I was. And I was in the hot tub, and I was drunk, and I was shouting across the. The. The valley. Beautiful location, but this. This cabin was at the top of every. Told it, like, different times. And the angle of the driveway and the length of the driveway always changes, but let's say something substantial, like between a quarter and half of a mile, Very. I will say very, very sharp incline. And. And so it wasn't someplace that you just, like, walk alongside this house and, like, see this house. So that's all set up. It's all preamble, because the next day, my wife's taking stuff out to the car for us to go home, and she takes a small bag out, and she comes back, and she's like, why did you do that? Like, what are you talking about? She's like, why did you do that? And I said, well, look, we're, you know, your first night, six days. Yeah, we're six days into the marriage. Why are we going to have an argument over this? Like, what is this? And she said, come out and look. And behind, as I recall it, my driver's rear, driver's side tire is a rock, like, about this size. I used to have a photo of it. I've lost it. But a rock about this size, it's, like, kind of wedged behind the tire. I sure as heck didn't drive over that thing. No, because this was like a staycation. Like, we just sort of stayed in the cabin doing what, you know, newlyweds do. And so I didn't drive over it. I'm looking around, like, there's kind of a garden over here, but there's not a big. Because that would leave a hole if you picked it up off the ground. Anyway, didn't seem to have fallen off the side of the mountain, which was all red Georgia clay, because that stuff stains everything. And it was right after this. This hot hooping and hollering that I did. I. I said, you know, did all that preamble about the length of the length and the angle of the driveway. Because if you're gonna prank somebody, I don't know if I'd walk up that snow slope in the middle of the night, and if I'm gonna put a rock somewhere, I'm gonna put it on the hood of their car or on the top of their car. I'm really gonna, you know, get to them. But this was just like, hey, stop messing around. Leave, like, something like, we're here. We're listening. Stop messing around. So that was. That was my first. I call it a Sasquatch adjacent experience. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Was. Do you feel like that was a signal? That was a message. That was an invitation.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I'm inclined to now with the trajectory that my life has taken. You know, I mean, there's so many things that kind of came together in that moment, because, as is part of my story, I did 2013, seven years later, check myself into rehab for alcoholism. So that was kind of an interesting thing to have happened after an especially drunken night.

[Interviewer]

Wait, what year is the. Was that Bigfoot rock? That was.

[Joshua Cutchen]

That was 2013.

[Interviewer]

That was a big year for you.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

What. What triggered going into rehab? You don't mind?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, so 2013 was. Was the honeymoon, and because you're, I

[Interviewer]

guess, halfway between being a famous writer and sobriety.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, yeah, it was. It was a. It was a weird thing. So 2013 was the. Was the Bigfoot Rock, and then 2020. I mean, what happened to me in 2020 is what happened to everybody in 2020.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And if you're. I'm not saying this to frame it so that people, you know, pandemic. Wrong. Right. I'm not saying that. But if you were going to choose an organic inflection point to change your behavior, seemed like that's what I was

[Interviewer]

being pointed towards, because everyone was angry, everyone was depressed.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. Everybody started drinking more.

[Interviewer]

I certainly didn't.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. And, you know, when you start. When you start ideating about, like, checking into a hospital just to get a break, it's like, well, maybe I should actually check into a hospital just to get a break. You know, there's some.

[Interviewer]

What was that decision? You woke up and you were like, that's enough. Or was it your wife?

[Joshua Cutchen]

I mean, look, it's sort of like,

[Interviewer]

you know, I understand.

[Joshua Cutchen]

No, no, no. And I'm. I'm an open book about this. I'm just trying to find the right way to articulate it. I was obviously doing some stuff wrong. She was obviously doing some stuff wrong. We had twin boys the year before, and that was a Weird time to be sort of cooped up with screaming toddlers.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And it was just like now or never. I don't really. I can't really put a pin in that moment. I have a friend I mentioned on the Patreon segment, so I don't know if I want to repeat myself here and delete that, but I have a friend who's working on a very interesting book who looked at my birth chart and thinks that it was always going to happen. Something was always going to happen on this particular day. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. And basically I was. I was due for a death rebirth narrative of some of some sort. And I could choose it or I could have it forced on me, but

[Interviewer]

it's happening either way.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It's happening either way. And. And so, you know, a bunch of synchronicities clustered at the head of that. You know, it was a.

[Interviewer]

Give us one.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. Yeah. It was the feast day. It was August 28, 2020. It was the feast day of St. Moses, which was a. One of the desert fathers who lived a life as a brigand until his sudden and instantaneous 180 conversion, which had some significance to me. And the fact that I also went to Mount Sinai, which was Moses's namesake, was the name of the rehab center. My. My therapist there was an extra. My therapist there grew up in Point Pleasant during the Mothman flap.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Joshua Cutchen]

During the collapse of the Silver Bridge

[Interviewer]

when John Keel was there.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. So I got to have, like, conversations with my rehab therapist about Jungian archetypes and.

[Performer]

Yeah.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Which, I mean, it's not to be unexpected, but also, like, we could go into, like, the Silver Bridge and Keel and it was just.

[Interviewer]

Did he meet Keel?

[Joshua Cutchen]

No, no, not to my knowledge. I mean, he was a boy at the time.

[Interviewer]

Sure.

[Joshua Cutchen]

But I just. It just seemed really odd. You know, I got home and there were. I don't know, I probably characterize it as like a light poltergeist effects. Like, things would be moved in some strange ways. And the most dramatic thing was the synchronicity that I still can't quite explain. But I. So having. Having twin boys, I get concerned about the software. Right.

[Interviewer]

I know. I love this one.

[Joshua Cutchen]

The software to upload into their brain. Yeah. And so, like, I'm constantly, like, revisiting, like, what do I. Like, what all do I need to. What do I learn through cultural osmosis? And, like, I need to teach them about, you know, entropy and the October Revolution and, like, I don't know, the battle of. Of. Of. Of Midway. And like, all this, like, all this random stuff that I've accumulated, Where do I accumulate it from? So.

[Interviewer]

Because you're homeschooling.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. And. Well, and just like, you know, even at the time, they weren't, you know, in school, per se, but it was just like, when, like, you got to start. Got to get on this, and am I fostering an environment where they're going to learn all this stuff? So I said, fine, we got to start somewhere. Where do I start? For whatever reason, I seized upon Aesop's Fable. So I was in my aftercare at the time, and I said, okay, I'm going to go home, and I'm going to go online. I'm going to order a book of Aesop's Fables, because I don't remember where I learned about ASOPS tables. Do you remember where I learned about as cultural osmosis? What was that? But there's a lot of good lessons in Aesop tables. Whatever you do, go home, Josh. Learn about Aesop Sables. Go online, get a copy of Aesop tables. Whatever you do as OP Sables. So I'm driving home Aesop Stables, a. And I get home, and my wife's like, well, you got to take the boys out for a walk. So it's like, okay. So I'm like, okay. So the entire time around the neighborhood, I'm going, okay, I'm going to go home. I'm going to get Aesop Stables into their hands. Because. Hands, because, like, you know, you can learn a lot of foundational stuff and moral stuff and some ways to think is asops. That's what Aesop Stables is. ASOPS Stables. ASOP Stables. And I get into the garage, and I'm literally taking the boys out of their stroller. And. And I get a call from my mom. I'm like, I don't need this right now. I need to go in and order asap. Staples. Right? And she says, hey, we're at the beach. Which I knew that they weren't at the beach. And we're at that bookstore that you always loved. And I just got the boys something that I think. Think they'll really enjoy. Do they. Do they have a copy of Aesop's Fables now?

[Interviewer]

We all have this story. Amazing.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. And you talk to Eric Wargo, and he'd say it was time loops, it was retro causality. And I'm not denying that it could be that. But it's interesting to me that the trigger for one of those profound synchronicities, the trigger for all my profound Synchronicities that I've had has been, you know, that emotional undercurrent and that sort of, in this case like a down payment of some sort of life change, death and rebirth narrative really, quite frankly. So, you know, I admire to the Moon and Back Eric's work because I think that regardless of where I depart with his perspective on things, something in there is bang on right. Something in there is bang on right.

[Interviewer]

I agree. So for people who don't know Eric's work, maybe explain time loops and where you stand on it.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. So the idea is that there is neither cause nor effect, but there is. These things are embedded in a, in a retro causal loop and that oftentimes it is accompanied by the trauma of that experience or the emotional investment and the emotional intention that causes that to manifest forward or backward. And that's a very poor way if Eric's listening, it's a very poor way of framing it. But go back and watch the episode

[Interviewer]

you were pre remembering Aesop's Fables.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Right, Right. And you know, I've, I've again, I've corresponded with Eric. I've known him for geez since the beginning. Really. And I think there's a lot to that. I just have some quibbles here and there which is like what, what sits at the center of that, of that time loop. You know, it's the idea of like, oh, I solved this great math equation because, because I came back and gave myself the answer and you know, where's, where, where did the answer come from?

[Interviewer]

Yeah, that's the, the working paradox.

[Joshua Cutchen]

That's the working paradox. And, and I would trust Eric's assessment on why that isn't a paradox and all these things.

[Interviewer]

And he explains it. And I, I, I'm in the same boat.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I'm like eh, I'm again, I'm.

[Interviewer]

The work has to come from somewhere though.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Right. And, and I think that ex nihilo space, as he's sort of been angling towards in his latest book From Nowhere, I would argue that that is where the metaphysical slips in. Right. You know, and I would point to creation myths for that.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And in creation myths I would say creation myths are stories and they are words or they are sung. The world is sung into being in a lot of these indigenous cosmologies. These are theme that you see over and over and over again. So I, I think that there has to be again a both and model where we are dealing with retro causality, but we're dealing with some other forces that are not going to correspond to materialism or physicalism. The other thing is, you know, an example that I didn't. I don't want to turn this into me beating up on Eric because I love his work so much, but he

[Interviewer]

doesn't watch this show.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I know, but I just. I want to emphasize. I want to emphasize the amount of respect that I have for him.

[Interviewer]

Same. He's changed my thinking on how time works.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. But another thing that I would disagree with him on is that, you know, he was speaking of a. Of a patient coming to their analyst with a dream full of archetypes, and the analyst didn't know what it was. The analyst reads in a book the correspondences of these archetypes and informs the patient. And that's what the patient was reacting to, was that sort of fulfillment that their archetypes could be pinned down.

[Interviewer]

But that's Jung's Beatles story.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It is the Beatles story. I just feel like there are plenty of people who go through life and end up embodying archetypes without ever having that payoff. Right. Like, I've met these people who are tricksters or they fulfill them, the mother archetype or any number of things. And they never. They never read the Red Book. They never have that moment where they're. Where they're being confirmed in terms of how they're behaving, you know, where they've. People have just sort of fallen into these patterns because the patterns pre exist us all.

[Interviewer]

So they just exist as this archetype. What do you mean by. It never gets paid off?

[Joshua Cutchen]

So. I have a friend who has a late friend who was a biker, and he was a rough and tumble kind of fellow, but apparently a sweetheart. And he lost an eye in a scuffle with a gun. With a gun. And by the time my friend got to know this gentleman, he would often wear a wide brimmed hat and curious walking staff because he had some leg problems. And now these two hounds that would sit on either side of him in his living room underneath a stuffed eagle. And he started volunteering at the VA doing therapeutic massage for veterans. That's Odin. Like. Like, I don't know. That's Odin. And finally, like, after he passed away, my friend approaches his wife and says, hey, did you ever. Did he ever say anything about this? That he was this conscious? Did he ever know about it? Was this ever in your life? And she's like, what. What's Odin? You know? So my point would be that if a lot of retro causality is contingent upon pre membering upon that payoff that would have made him, oh, I'm being Odin. So that's what made me start acting like Odin.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

That never happened.

[Interviewer]

No.

[Joshua Cutchen]

You know, and so that's. That's what I would sort of quibble with, is that there's some. There's some force that seems to me. And again, if anybody isn't familiar with my work, I'm first and foremost probably a mystic. There seems to be some sort of force that reaches down and seizes us. Or, you know, to use one of my favorite definitions of archetypes, as Jung would have put forward, you know, these are. These are riverbeds that are carved through the landscape. These are furrows with little tributaries here and there, and they can go dry, but once you get a substantial enough rainfall, it's exactly where the water is going to go.

[Interviewer]

And it's because the two meet is what causes it.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Right, right. And so, you know, I feel like we are constantly falling into these. These modes of being a lot more than we consciously realize.

[Interviewer]

I think you might be right. 2012, 2013. So I know that you're writing press releases, you're a substitute teacher, you're listening to paranormal stuff, you listen to paranormal podcasts. What was just like a Tuesday like for you before this all started?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Oh, before sobriety. It usually involved 750ml of vodka. Bottom shelf. No, it was just. It was just what, your.

[Host]

What's your commute?

[Interviewer]

You wake up in the morning, you. You have your flask.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, I mean, so to sort of summarize my journey, a lot of potential to be an orchestral tuba player in the world of classical music, that probably is going to steer you towards higher ed professorship sort of thing. Because orchestral jobs, I mean, there are what, 50. Orchestral tuba player job. There's one person that fulfills that role in the orchestra, and they keep it till they die. So, like, you've got to sort of. Anyway, long story short, I ended up having some performance injury issues that made it difficult for me to sustain some stuff, to sustain notes. Vocal dystonia. It's run rampant through a lot of brass players. It's. I've since recovered because I'm not spending eight hours, you know, playing all the time. And I took time off, but at the time was pretty devastating. So it's like, well, what do I do? Finished a master's in music literature, which is like a musicology light degree. It was supposed to be a performance degree. I pivoted, then got a second master's in journalism, and then Again said, what do I do? The idea was to go into arts journalism. I worked as public affairs director for the University of Georgia School of music for 3ish years. And in the meantime, at a university in the summer, there's not a lot going on. So I had picked up a copy of J. Robert Alley's Raincoat Sasquatch, which is a great book. In it, he mentions that many, among other things, Ali's perspective is that we are dealing with a hominid. But he pays a lot of attention and respect towards indigenous belief. And in the book he mentions that the Bigfoot analog for the Kwakiutl in Alaska, the Baques, is known to give people who are led astray give them food. Usually it's looks like dried salmon, but it's actually tree bark that's been disguised to look otherwise. And if you take this food from the bequest, you're trapped with the bequest forever. And I said, wait a minute, this is, this is right out of Western European fairy folklore. If you take food in fairyland, you're trapped with the fairies forever. But Alaska's kind of far from, From Ireland. Even the cloaking of the bark to look like salmon is fairy glamour. Like, there are numerous illusions. And in Western European traditions where once fairy glamour is removed, the food that they give you is like leaves and twigs and stuff. It's like, that's just so specific to me that I sat with that for a while and I said, look, there's. There's one of three things happening here. Either there was an international civilization that was exchanging myths and legends at a level much deeper than we appreciate, or the collective unconscious is a thing, or people are describing objectively their interactions with the other world. Any three of those, which I think are kind of the only three options that I can figure out. Any three of those blows apart your worldview. I said, this is really cool. Nick Redfern should write a book on that. And I sort of sat around and waited for Nick to write a book, because this was in the era when Nick was just pumping them out, like every six months. I'm like, is it me? Like, is this, Is this what I'm supposed to be doing? So one summer I pulled all the resources together and wrote the book that became A Trojan Feast. And I don't know what I was thinking. I don't know why. I don't know what my wife was thinking, honestly. But I timed the release with my two weeks notice at the University of Georgia. And then it was a while of just playing Gigs.

[Interviewer]

Well, how risky is that?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, my, my wife had a. Had a. My wife worked for cdc, so we had a net. We had a safety net, but it was just. I mean, there were a lot of things that contributed to my alcoholism, but having 60 bosses in a university setting is.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Is one of them. So it was obviously unsustainable in that regard.

[Interviewer]

But being a musician author also sounds like a reason to drink to me.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I mean, you don't know. I mean, it's musician author, but also like low brass players have a reputation for, for knocking them back too. Yeah. So it's like I'm getting. Scott. Scott. I'm Scottish too, so it's like it's got. I've got all the, all the risk, the risk factors. I went to school in Wisconsin. I mean, like, you know, it's like a set up for failure in terms of substance abuse. But anyway, so yeah, it was, it was risky, but it was, it was killing me. And so what I did was I pivoted and I built a pretty good little cottage industry of just gigging and teaching private lessons, doing a lot of like, in school clinics. And then we had our boys and it became very apparent rather that I was spending all day out just to turn around and give money to someone to watch the kids. So I became Mr. Mom. That sort of brings us closer into 2020, when the Mr. Mom thing was kind of what was making me fall down that rabbit hole too.

[Interviewer]

Well, hang on a second. Music literature. So you're studying architecture, structure, motif patterns. Is that informing your methodology with. With Trojan.

[Joshua Cutchen]

So you don't get out of two master's degrees without like kind of appreciating hunting down sources. Sure. That's the way I look at it.

[Interviewer]

You know, your footnotes are ridiculous. Half the book.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, I got. Yeah, I got a new one coming out next month that's like 1300 endnotes. And I feel like I've kind of undershot my, my goal. But yeah, I try to. Well, that's the problem that has been historically the problem in the space that people will just say stuff and not say where to find it. And I could do a little bit better job of pinpointing actual page numbers, but I have my reasons for not doing that. Yeah, Kindle has made it difficult to do that.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Joshua Cutchen]

But anyway, so. So that's part of it, you know, part of it is, is you do end up reading things like Adorno and philosophers of different types that make you think in different ways. That's part of it too. Although you know what, AJ it's really kind of wild. I. I look back on one of my earlier book, one of my earlier essays, and it was about taking a look at Strauss's Till Euler and Spiegel, who was a trickster figure. And one of the books that I cracked open was Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes this World, which is a book that I still use today. So. And like, the trickster phenomena has influenced and informed so much of the way that I think about this stuff that it's like, oh, was that. Were the seeds planted in that. With that particular book. And it was probably the best bit of musical writing I've ever done. I've stuffed away in a binder somewhere. Somewhere. But yeah. So I think that. That all these things do sort of come together. And that's the thing. If you would go back 15 years and tell your older self what. Younger self, what you're doing today, you'd be like, what? Like, how did you get there? Why did you get there? You know? But it all. You do kind of tend to get

[Interviewer]

nudged in the right direction with the paranormal offering food. So that that book comes out and people in the space were saying, why didn't anyone think of this before?

[Joshua Cutchen]

I had. It's kind of good that I had no idea what I was stepping into. I had a. For. For whatever reason, I had a degree of efficient. Of a familiarity with or no, not a parasocial relationship, I guess, with Micah Hanks, because we both are from North Carolina. And I just sort of cold emailed Micah at one point and explained him my project and like, do you know where I should shop this manuscript around?

[Interviewer]

And who's he?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Micah is a dear friend now. He just completed the audiobook of my novel Them Old Ways Never Died, but should be coming out any day now. But he is a UFO researcher, Fortune par excellence, master of the endless comma, is sometimes what I say about Micah. But just a really sharp guy, very grounded. He runs the debrief website. And Michael was just so warm and welcoming about it. And he not only like, so he had me on his show. Not even having this thing published for whatever reason is beyond me. Somehow. I think he was really, really running with the Mysterious Universe guys at the time. And they had me on Mysterious Universe without having it published. Like, what is going on here? With that sort of momentum. And again, just the grace of God with that sort of momentum, it made Patrick Weege an anomalous book. Sort of take an interest in the manuscript. And Patrick's first thing Was like, all book publishing house heads of those sort of things was like, well, you know, we reject most stuff that we get, but I'll take a look at it. And Patrick was over the moon about it. And I still have a great relationship with Patrick today. I don't publish with Anomalous anymore. But it's. It has nothing to do with him as a person. He was just so supportive. And Patrick Weis, I read his books in middle school. Like, you know, I've got his copy of his guide to, you know, lake monsters and sea serpents that he did with Lauren Coleman. Like, and now I'm. He's my publisher.

[Interviewer]

How cool is that?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. And then, like, you know, there's a favorable review from Jerry Clark and Forte and Times, I think. And, like, it just. It was just one of these things where it's like, what world have I stepped into? And now if I look at my. The contact list on my cell phone, it's like, what? What? Like, what is. It's. It's. I'm. I'm so, so blessed and so happy because it does feel like the kid who, you know, ends up shooting hoops in his neighborhood and playing with, you know, Michael Jordan or something. It's the way it feels sometimes.

[Interviewer]

Can you give us some examples of the exchange of food? Because I hadn't heard that.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Abductees.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, that was sort of one of the things that I think people were overlooking. So one of my central contentions is that this phenomenon is everything and nothing at once. Right. It wears a lot of different masks. My favorite depiction of the phenomenon is that reissue of Passport to Magonia where it's got this.

[Interviewer]

His valet.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, but it's from. I believe it was Daily Girl, Daily Grail Publishing. They've got a gray alien holding a fairy mask and a demon mask and a 50s sci fi alien mask. The actual original painting showed that the Grayling itself was a puppet being puppeteered off of, out of the frame, which is like the perfect summation of the phenomenon. Like, there's something there, but it's always changing and adapting and adopting. So Valet had already made a lot of pointed comparisons to older European spirit belief in general fairy belief, more specifically in Passport to Magonia. It's like a foundational text for everything that I've done. And one of the things that you look at when you look at a lot of fairy folklore, and again, we know this mostly from Western Europe, but I can provide examples from pretty much every inhabited continent, is that if you go into fairyland, and you are given something to eat or drink, you got to refuse it because you're going to be stuck there. At the time I didn't know that this was a more pervasive myth. You'll find it in Oceania regarding the dead, the land of the dead, similarly in South America. But like whenever you're in that other space, you don't eat and don't drink. And so if Valet's comparisons between fairies and UFOs holds true, then do we see this sort of food taboo from fairy folklore manifesting itself in the UFO context? And you kind of do. The point that I tried to make in that first book was that a lot of these encounters are relatively brief, like, you know, you're being very hospitable with a nice spread out there. But I'm not sure that that would have been necessary for an abduction or for a contactee, you know, two or three hour meeting. But food and drink did get exchanged in these stories. They get exchanged in alien abduction accounts as well.

[Interviewer]

What kind of food?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, let me, let me, let me sort of put a pin in this other thought. They get exchanged in the abduction stuff as well, but they've also kind of changed.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

We're talking about how the phenomenon changes and how it adapts. I think an argument could be made that, you know, injections and ointments and pills and things that feature all across abductions are sort of a variation on that. The sorts of.

[Interviewer]

I hadn't thought of that. That's true.

[Joshua Cutchen]

The sorts of food and drink that that get exchanged roughly correspond to the character of the experiences. Right. So contactees of the 1950s and 60s, people who met with space brothers voluntarily, those are voluntary, pleasant experiences. And the alien abductions, especially the 70s and 80s, again, the phenomenon's changing. We can talk about that if you want to. Non voluntary, non consensual, unpleasant. And so the sort of food that you see in these experiences oftentimes aligns with that. You'll get references to milk and fruits and a lot of the contact he experiences, you'll get references to again, ointments and nasty tasting liquids. Obviously these people came back, unlike in the fairy folklore they, they consumed in the other world, but they were able to come back. But I still think that not being able to go home can mean a lot of things. Right? It can mean you don't get to go back to the way it used to be. Your world is forever changed or you're going to be a recurring experiencer. But one of the interesting things is that if you look at, if you look at the timing of a lot of these consumptive acts in the UFO literature, a lot of times they'll happen towards the end of the experience. And so you kind of have to sit back and say, okay, well, if I consume certain things in this space, I go there. You know, if I. If I take five dried grams of mushrooms in silent darkness, I go there.

[Interviewer]

Right, you go there.

[Joshua Cutchen]

So is this them? Their way of sending us back sometimes is to consume something over there. Because again, I'm not entirely sure this. There's a physical component to this. I'm not entirely sure how physical it is all the time.

[Interviewer]

Could communion. Communion be related to this?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, I mean, Whitley talked about being given things to consume in communion, and I think just at the very heart of it, that the name itself speaks to what's going on there.

[Interviewer]

So the body of Christ, you. I guess you become.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Oh, you mean specific. Yeah, I went to Whitley route. Oh, yeah. Well, this is, this is. So this is. This is a whole nother. Yeah, I mean, this is. I think this is 100 part of this. So, yeah, the act of sitting and breaking bread historically is a type of commune, a type of commingling and accepting and being in and of that space. But yeah, I would argue that the act of Christian communion says a lot more than we really think about, because you're eating in the tradition flesh and drinking blood, and this ties back into some very ancient, very widespread ideas in certain indigenous cosmologies. People are probably familiar with this, but, like, you know, you might vanquish your foe and eat part of them to take on their power.

[Interviewer]

Sure.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Or you might fashion, you know, you might fashion a cup out of their skull. It's a similar idea. And so there's actually, there's an ancient trope called eating the God. The idea that by the act of consuming the divine, you're in. You're internalizing it and becoming communing with it.

[Interviewer]

Right, sure.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Similarly, if you look at, you know, the Ayahuasca traditions and their analogs in South America, there is the assertion that the medicine is at once plant and vine and drink and deity as well. So you're literally consuming of the deity and internalizing it. And so I think that something similar, at least on the motivic level, is what we're seeing in some of these stories from experiencers.

[Interviewer]

There must be something to it because the experiences are so similar across cultures.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, it's the fairy UFO thing is the gift that keeps on giving.

[Interviewer]

Is it

[Joshua Cutchen]

in the sense that I

[Interviewer]

always thought fairies were fun little things until I started researching. It's like.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Couldn't be more. Okay, I got Stretch for this one. No, It's. So what Dr. Vallee did in Passport to Magonia was something that I think the best observations do, which it wasn't. Hey, look at this similarity. That's all by. That's a cool thing that he noticed. No, you can continue and keep unpacking it and keep on unfurling and finding other dimensions to it. There's plenty of stuff that he didn't mention about similarities between the fey folk and aliens, but let's put a pin in that and sort of backtrack to what fairies are.

[Interviewer]

Right? Yeah,

[Joshua Cutchen]

it's tough sometimes. It really is, because I. I talk about being interested in fairies and people think I'm meaning something completely different. The fairies of folklore, the fairies that a lot of our ancestors, my ancestors in Scotland might have interacted with, were never really depicted as tiny, winged, effete sprites. They were dark, chonic, oftentimes sized like a proportion like your average human being. Great. If they liked you and you treated them well. Did not want to get on their bad side. If you made a mistake, sometimes an innocent mistake, like whistling, you could. You could get punished for whistling in the wrong place or failing to leave out offerings, which is sort of where the. A lot of this very stuff comes into with A Trojan Feast as well. But anyway, very different class of character. The theory that we know today is children's books and Shakespearean play stagings and stuff like that. There's a whole nother conversation to have about what fairies look like in witness reports now and what that says about the phenomenon. But, you know, we can go there if you want to later, but. But the original sort of version of that was darker and stranger. And a lot of the things that Valet was pointing out really do seem to line up. And you've got stature, you've got little men in green becoming little green men. Powers of levitation. Although fairies didn't have wings in terms of folklore, they were always granted powers of levitation. People being picked up and whisked away to other different spaces. Fairyland reads a lot like some of the descriptions of either the rooms aboard spaceships or sometimes in the contactee literature, these other planets that people went to.

[Interviewer]

Could they read a lot like Book of Enoch and Enoch traveling with Uriel to the ship?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, yeah, I think it's, again, part of this multiple masks sort of thing.

[Interviewer]

Or the Jinn?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Oh, absolutely. In the Jinn there's reason to quibble with the statement, but the Djinn could very easily be understood as Muslim theory analogs. Right. But all these different things sort of add together, and I've completely lost track of where your initial question was.

[Interviewer]

Just. Just about how affairs are misunderstood.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, yeah. So they're misunderstood. But then there are these other things that sort of valet left out that I don't think he did intentionally, and he probably even saw them. But, like, there's only so much you can put into a book. A lot of times in these older fairy stories. Not fairy tales. Fairy stories which imply eyewitnesses and folk tales. You've got the smaller fairies all around, but there's a fairy king or fairy queen, and they're usually taller, much taller in lithe. And that sounds a lot like what we hear from David Jacobs. Your mileage may vary, but it's like a lot what we hear from David Jacobs about the taller supervising grays. There's the connection between fairies in the dead and UFOs in the dead, which I've explored recently. You know, there's the fact that fairies came in all sorts of variety of shapes and sizes, like a Pokemon catalog. Right. And similarly, it's what we see with the. With the taxonomy of aliens today is that there's just endless variation. So it's just. You can just keep on unpacking this and unpacking this and unpacking this.

[Interviewer]

There was one researcher. I forget her name, but I think she said at one point, far in the past, every fairy was a dead person.

[Joshua Cutchen]

This is something that took me a long time to wrap my head around is how to make that work. Right. So that's. That's the one thing that you'll run into some people when they say, oh, they know what fairies are, it's like nobody knows. Like, I. I have plenty of friends who are fairy scholars. Check out Morgan Daimler's work. Check out Simon Young's work, even. They will say, we have no idea. Like, there are arguments to be made, and there are better arguments and worse arguments to be made, but we really don't know for sure. There's the argument that they were demoted pagan deities. You know, the Christians came along and said that they were the angels that were too good for hell and too bad for heaven that felt of the earth. But, you know, something that Dr. Simon Young has pointed out is that, like a lot of these cultures, when they talked about fairies, were trying to find some way to talk about the dead. Because you. Innumerable stories. Stories Involving the food taboo. People will be at the fairy banquet. They walk by a fairy fort, and they're invited inside because it's opened up this one day a year. And they go inside and they're all these. And then they'll see somebody that they recognize, and it's a dead friend or a dead neighbor, and they're the one who says, don't, don't. Don't eat or drink this because you're going to be trapped here. But that sort of mode of, Of. Of mechanism, of, of. Of metamorphosis is something that took me a long time to wrap my head around. And so the way that Claude Lecouto, former professor at the Sorbonne, described it, he just passed away this past November, but great. He writes my favorite UFO books because he never uses the word ufo, but, like, it's just great stuff. But he wrote a lot of books on household spirits and spirits of the land and such. And he described the process as. You have someone who is revered by the community, a chieftain or a soldier or a priest or priestess, and then they're buried in a certain place, and that place becomes revered as their burial spot. But over time, as we are want to do as a species, like, we sort of forget and we sort of treat those connections more loosely, and it becomes sort of a sort of spirit of. Of the place. And from there, they sort of get syncretized with fairy beliefs as being these sort of spirits out in the wilderness. We see this really clearly, actually, in some cultures. Even in the more modern era, Buryat shamans would be interred in one place and then later exhumed and then specifically buried in a new location to serve as the spirit of that place. So this genus loci idea, which is very closely related to spirits, you know, that's a fairy glen, that's a fairy pond or whatever, these ideas sort of start to merge together.

[Interviewer]

And burial mounds and things like that.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, I mean, that's the other thing is, like, so many of these sites that are associated with fairies, again, I feel like I say it all the time, but in western Europe, but arguably worldwide, are sepulchral sites. They're sites that involve burials. Sure.

[Interviewer]

I mean, the serpent mound in Ohio, they see all kinds of stuff over there.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. And. And. But thinking specifically to, like, you know, Ireland and the British Isles, these burial mounds are unambiguously burial tumuli, you know, but they're also where the fairies are to so happen to be. They're. You know, there are many traditions that say that the dead live inside Hills, not coincidentally, you know, that's where we put a lot of our underground alien bases in modern UFO mythology. But there's this strong connection through that that even, you know, does extend, especially in my part of. Of of America with the Cherokee. There's a strong association between some of the burial tumuli and the tumuli down there and the nunyanihi, their. Their fairy variant. One of their fairy variants. So, yeah, it's just. And that's. That's what always gets me. That's what. All that's. That's what really keeps me going, is I take a look at, you know, those Cherokee traditions, for example, and reading the association between fairy. What we would call fairies very clearly time dilation, missing time, taking people away into the forest, that sort of thing.

[Interviewer]

Yep, sounds familiar.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Being associated with these earthworks and people across the Atlantic saying the exact same thing. And look, I. I have to remain open to cultural contamination, right? That's always an ever looming specter. But if not, that's what gets me going, because it's like somewhat we're. There's some strata of reality that we're interacting with where we're all coming to the same conclusions as a. As a. As a humanity.

[Interviewer]

No question about it. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, let's. I want to talk about some more patterns that you found that nobody else did, specifically Grimstone.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Okay. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Be right back. So 1994, my dad has an operation, one of many. He dies on the table. They bring him back. When he comes back, he says he had a conversation with his mother, and he smelled roses and in brimstone. It's so funny because you would think, is there enough data to write a whole book about smells?

[Joshua Cutchen]

I got that a lot. I got that a lot.

[Interviewer]

But there is.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It's one of those things. And this is sort of a lot of what I've done is it's one of those things that people mention in passing in their own books, and they'll say, that's kind of interesting, kind of funny. I wonder what that's all about. Anyway, and they continue with the next story. And those are the details that always sort of make me go, well, hang on, hang on. Let's. Let's go back to that and revisit it. What can we learn by unpacking a lot of this stuff? You know, I think this is a similar philosophy to what the late Carla Turner had, was that like, you know, some of these details might be holding the key to understanding a lot of this stuff. So after Trojan Feast went on and wrote the Brimstone Deceit, which kind of sounds like a Joel Osteen book title, but.

[Interviewer]

It does.

[Joshua Cutchen]

But what do you call a book about, you know, paranormal smells, especially when sulfur appears so often. So that's what we went with. And there was. I still see stuff today that I'm like, oh, that would have been great to put in that book. It's just it, it really is a pervasive set of observations that happen in this, in this area.

[Interviewer]

What was the first one that made you go, wait a minute.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, it was, it wasn't. I'm not sure if it was a specific account, but it was probably some of those observations that John Keel had made. Because, you know, if I could, if I had a shrine in my house, it would probably be to John Keel and Jacques Valle. Right. Like, I feel like there's so much of what I do that's interesting because

[Interviewer]

they fundamentally are completely opposite and they. What's going on?

[Joshua Cutchen]

They had different hands on the elephant, you know. Different hands on the elephant.

[Interviewer]

That's right. That's a great way to put it.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And, you know, and the goal is to become the coincidentia positorum. Right. That's the union of opposites. But I think it was some of those observations that Keel had made very presciently that, you know, people report brimstone or sulfur in these accounts and there's this knee jerk reaction, especially in, you know, Christian America, to say, oh, it must mean demons. And it's like, well, have you ever like really understood the origins of that smell or the history of the way that smell was identified and stuff? I mean, for example, if you go back all the way into antiquity, people in the classical traditions were misidentifying the smell of ozone as the smell of sulfur. They'd say, you know, the lightning strike and it was the smell of sulfur. And similarly, in more recent years, around the turn of the 20th century, people were being sent to convalesce by the seaside because of the great ozone vapors in the air. And it's like, now you're probably talking about sulfur.

[Interviewer]

Sulfur.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. So there's.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, hydrogen sulfur.

[Joshua Cutchen]

There's that to consider.

[Interviewer]

How about the oracle at Delphi? Same.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. And that's sort of the. So whenever you establish an area to look into, you sort of sort of starts branching out, like tributaries. And one of those is the idea of things like the oracle at Delphi inhaling certain fumes or the idea that burnt offerings are meant to Trans. They're meant to transmit the offerings themselves to the supernal realms through the smoke. That's a means of getting the offering from here to there. So there are all these things that you've just sort of got to sit with and say, well, what bearing, if any, does this have on a lot of these modern experiences? And so I really wanted to try and unpack that. And for a while, it kind of looked like I was going to get pigeonholed as the five senses guy. Like, I'm like, I don't want to write a book on. On par, paranormal touch. That sounds like.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It sounds like a dangerous place to go. But, yeah.

[Interviewer]

What is it? What I find interesting about the smells is it's the one sense that bypasses thalmic altogether, goes directly to the amygdala emotion center. There's no narrative structure at all. So it's culturally agnostic.

[Joshua Cutchen]

That's an excellent way to put it.

[Interviewer]

And doesn't that make it more. More real, the account?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, it not only makes it more real, and I think it also makes it more ripe for hijacking. Right. So there's actually an entire subset of like scent philosophy, olfactory philosophy, which was a surprise to me. But one of the things they've sort of examined, some of these scholars, Guerrero, I think, is the one that I was looking into, talked about how we've oftentimes treated our noses as reliable witnesses. Right. You know, it passes the smell test. The nose knows all these things. If you smell it like something's. So you can smell that something's off. And so the idea that you would be. I could make a thousand different explanations for a trick of the light for me to see something strange. But when you've got that accompanied by something that you're smelling too, it really does put it in a place of. Of authenticity. Right. In addition to, like you said, just like jumping right to your emotional centers. Like if I, if I. I have ex girlfriends. Sorry, Sarah, if you're watching this, I have ex girlfriends that if I smelled their perfume, like, I would immediately think of that person and those emotions associated with that. And if we are dealing with a phenomenon, as I've suspected, that really does like to traffic and meaning and quite frankly, manipulation, for good or for ill. What a tool to use.

[Interviewer]

Yes. Because your memory goes right there. When you smell something, childhood, you can.

[Joshua Cutchen]

You can try not to think of it like, you can not want to think of it.

[Host]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And it'll just. It'll override that completely, which is kind of like it's almost like even better than telepathy, where it's akin to telepathy, where it's like it's just going straight in your head and there's no way you can not hear it or, or mishear it. And, and the smells, like a lot of my work proposes that there's a meta position intelligence that's in control of how it's seen and when it's seen and what it does while it's seen. Which is my logical exemption for why we don't have better evidence. Right.

[Interviewer]

That's kind of a Valet esque way to look at it. Well, yeah, that there's a structure.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. And, and that, that if it doesn't want to be seen, it's not going to be seen. Or when it does get seen, it's a colossal fuck up. There we go. That's my F bomb.

[Interviewer]

Now hang on, that's, that's George Hansen's trickster theory, is it can't be seen.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Is you try. And what I love about Hanson's work is he says the trickster, you try to observe it. As soon as you try to observe it, you can't. Like that's quantum mechanics, man.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It really is. And it's, it's not only that, but it's, it's, it's one of those things that. It's almost like we as a species intuited that before we had the tools to sort of interrogate quantum mechanics. But, but yeah, it's, it's so, so if, if the phenomenon can control how it's seen and how it presumably smells like what a smell to choose. So. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Why, why roses and.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Roses and sulfur. Yeah. So the book is the Brimstone Deceit and it talks about bad smells, but there's just all smells end up ended up in the book and you do see rose smells in terms of saints and in terms of Blessed Virgin Mary sightings, of course, and in select UFO encounters as well. I think it was, it was either Dennis, was it Dennis Kucinich who smelled a rose scented ufo? I don't know. I could, there was one, I could look it up. Yeah, there was one. Yeah, I believe that's what it was. And if it's, if not, I'm mistaken. But it's a smell that you get from time to time. But a lot of these do have some sort of sulfur smell and then the task there is to sort of unpack what people mean. Right, so do they mean ozone, sulfur, that sort of conflation that we're talking about, do they mean hydrogen sulfide, which is that rotten egg smell, do they mean sulfur dioxide, which is that, that gunpowder smell?

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And then even things that people make other comparisons to say, oh, it smelled like natural gas. Well, natural gas is odorless. We add methane thiols to it to more aware of when there's a gas leak. And guess what those contain? Those thiols contain sulfur. So there's something about this sulfur connection that I think is really fascinating and we've so long associated with demons. But if you look at like, you know, for example, biblical sources, it's always been presented as a, as a great thing, the cleansing breath of God's. Whenever God makes a point to cleanse something, he's using sulfur. And we know about this today. Like acne medications often contain sulfur. Like sulfur is a fumigant, it's, it's an antimicrobial. And so like the fact that devil, the devil and demons smell like sulfur isn't the fact that they smell bad because they're evil, it's God trying to cleanse them, throwing them into the fire. You have to unpack all this stuff. But, but hydrogen sulfide specifically, this fact blows my mind every time I think about it. We are so sensitive to hydrogen sulfide that we can detect it at.5 parts per billion. To put that in perspective, if I had a, a semi that was carrying like an oil, like a liquid semi, you know, like oil tanker or whatever, or a semi full of milk, whatever, and you took a medicine dropper and you put one drop of ink in there, that would be twice the concentration at which we can smell hydrogen sulfide. So if the stuff, if this phenomenon wishes to not be noticed and it's in control of how it smells, it's a poor choice. So it's almost like it's designed to be attention grabbing.

[Interviewer]

Well, I mean, astronomers are using spectrography to see if there's life on other planets. Right. They're looking for oxygen. They're also looking for hydrogen sulfide.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Right, Right. And there's some of the emissions on Venus. I don't know if this has been settled since, but some of the emissions on Venus of sulfur are so plentiful and not reacting the way that they should that there's been some speculation that there's some sort of artificial generator of some of these sulfur compounds on Venus. Even for me, who doesn't ascribe to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, that makes you go, huh, okay, that's, that's interesting. I don't know what to. What to do with that. Because you would think that chemistry would be a universal constant.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

So, yeah. And I think that these things, again, if we are to posit that this is deliberate, and it may well not be, then it might be to get our attention because so many of these experiences seem so tailor made to people relying on their personal lives and their personal symbolism and seeing sometimes dead loved ones and such. I'm also open to other ideas that like, you know, this isn't. We're not smelling these things decaying. Like maybe they enter our reality and they have a sort of half life. Right. They have a sort of half life where as soon as they show up, they start literally entropying or decaying.

[Interviewer]

As a Christian is. Has. Have your views changed at all being in this space?

[Joshua Cutchen]

I mean, there's just so much cognitive dissonance every day. Yeah, it's weird.

[Interviewer]

Sulfur's in the Bible.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. I mean, it's so my own sort of faith journey where I sort of landed with a lot of that is that Christ was a meeting point of a lot of different archetypes. Maybe the most potent meeting point of archetypes that's ever been in existence. And I don't think that, you know, because I do run into.

[Interviewer]

Well, number one, which archetypes would you attribute to Christ?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, obviously the Messiah, right? I mean, yes, but. But you know, the, the redemptive son, but also the Son and the Father. There's just so many different things coming to it to a head in that. But the, the thing that I would sort of come back to is that a lot of. I think it behooves Christians to be interested in these topics and to think them through before disclosures of any sort happen. But I also have to say that. I also have to say that I've thought of the way that I look at these topics and what they might say about my own faith as sort of being like a kid taking apart a clock. Right. So I want to understand how the clock works. Right. And I want to get in there and take a look at the timing mechanisms and the cogs and the wheels and such and the pendulum. But even when I take apart the clock and even if I understand how the clock works, the clock is the universe. It's not going to tell me what time is. It's not going to make me more punctual. You know, that layer of interfacing with reality is. Is where my spirituality comes in.

[Interviewer]

This is a nice metaphor.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, I was really proud of it when I came up because, you know, I've. I've. I've. I've had to think about this a lot. And so, yeah, I think that's sort of where I've been able to make peace with it. And I've. It's so I kind of wrestle with. With how much and how I speak about it. Because when you say that, people start drawing conclusions about how exclusionary you are regarding these subjects.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Or that at the end of the day, I must boil down and think that UFOs are demons. And that's not at all where I land. I'm sympathetic to people who think that because they're thinking outside of that extraterrestrial hypothesis framework. And then we can have a conversation about transpersonal psychology, we can have a conversation about trickster phenomena. We can have all those conversations if they're not automatically on that sort of orthopedic orthodox eth. Trajectory. But that's still not what I think. I think that everything is so much more complex than. Than we give it credit for. And that's why I've always gravitated towards that ecology of souls. Phrasing is because I love the idea of the. The diversity and the richness of a bunch of different weird things that maybe we can call spirits. I don't know, like another dimension is synonymous with the other world, is synonymous with fairyland, to me, maybe even synonymous with the afterlife. But like a rich ecosystem of different intelligences and presences all filling these niches and oftentimes completely removed from this dichotomy of good versus evil that the Christian discussion always forces us into. You know, the example that I use is like a tornado or a shark could really ruin my day. But they're not evil, you know, And I think that might be a little bit more of what we're seeing, rather than the sort of reductive binary that the UFOs or demons question always gets forced into whenever you start talking about these topics and Christianity.

[Interviewer]

Well, that the demons or just UFOs being spiritual. I'm hearing that more and more and more. And yet, and I think you might have even said this, the 2017 New York Times piece was probably a setback for UFO research.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I've thought that.

[Interviewer]

I thought that because we're back to aerospace, we're back to.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, well, this is something that I've noticed throughout the ufo. It's an interesting day to be talking about this, right? The mediation of the. The conversation. My friend David Metcalf, brilliant fella. He's pointed to the Fact that these narratives often get mediated. Good example that he likes to use is that in the Cold war, in the 50s, I believe it was, Project Moon Dust was dedicated to retrieving space debris and ostensibly Soviet materials. But maybe if they came upon a ufo, they collected it too. But nobody was really talking about crash retrieval programs in the 50s when it was actually happening. And then like a light switch in the 90s, that's all we can talk about. That's all we're talking about. And I think people, I think it would be in everyone's interest to really pay attention to what you're being told to talk about. Right. So what I was perceiving prior to the, prior to the release of the New York Times article, Neophyte, that I was right, admittedly had a lifelong interest, but I was only two books in at this point, I did see sort of a course correction in terms of the narrative because people were talking about altered states of consciousness and all these things that like really get me going because that's the way I found myself to being interested in the UFO topic was that I said, well, these don't have to be thousands of different types of craft and thousands of different civilizations. It can just be this one, one thing that's interacting with us in this never never land. Right. But that New York Times article drops and we're back, you're right, talking about propulsion systems and anti gravity systems. And there's another form of, of real loss here that I think is happening because this is a very Western European sort of way of thinking about the UFO question. There are all these cohorts from marginalized populations and from indigenous populations that don't think about this phenomenon in that way.

[Interviewer]

They wrap it in with spirituality and NDEs.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Right. So when you're talking about like hybrid programs or propulsion systems or any of this stuff, they just. Right doesn't. And so they feel like they're on the outside of it. When a lot of them are having these same experiences, they're just not framing them in the same way. And a classic example of this is, you know, if you look at the work of Cynthia Hind, who actually did. Started asking the right questions in the right ways with people, and I believe it was Zimbabwe, she was finding that a lot of these people were framing this as ancestor phenomenon and that there really wasn't a distinction between craft and occupant and any of this stuff. These things were morphous categories where there was no real, there was no real contradiction in the idea that you would have a Craft come down and then turn into a human being, which is something that you honestly kind of do here in a lot of these insurance stories. So that's something that really makes me very hesitant towards the, you know, friend of mine, Dr. Jeff Croppo, will call the threat narrative that we're being fed constantly. And I'm not saying that all this stuff is sweetness and light. We know that it's not.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

My rehab trip was not all sweetness and light.

[Interviewer]

No.

[Joshua Cutchen]

But it needed to happen.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It was necessary. And so I think that this. This sort of naivete of like, oh, these things are up in the sky and we need to shoot them down. We can shoot them down. I'm not sure that's the most mature way to take it. And that felt like one of those pivots and mediation mediating of the narrative moments when that article dropped. But at the same time, at the same time, it got people acknowledging the paranormal component. You know, the idea that we were looking into things like Skinwalker Ranch.

[Host]

True.

[Interviewer]

But then when Luis Elizondo says, this is an existential threat, I go, oh, no, this is not helpful at all. So is that narrative being constructed or is that the trickster in the way.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It reminds me of that. That Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns is mistaken for an alien. They say it's bringing peace and love. Break its legs. Don't let it get away. Yeah. I mean, and that's the thing. That's what I've resonated so much with. You know, if anybody listening to this picks up one book from this discussion, don't pick up my books. Pick up George P. Hanson's the Trickster and the Paranormal. And be gentle with yourself. Take time to read through it. Some of it reads like VCR instructions. Yes. I think that, that. That comparison is especially more apt now that VCR is. Aren't a thing because it's even more inscrutable. But it's the only book that I've run into that has predictive power in this space.

[Interviewer]

It really does.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And that's something remarkable. And in case anybody doesn't know, George is making the argument that the trickster archetype hovers over all these phenomena. Do not make the mistake that we're talking about like a capital T, trickster, God or anything. Archetypes. Remember, they're those dry riverbeds. They're the way that things tend to go when things happen.

[Interviewer]

So this isn't a conscious consciousness or sense.

[Joshua Cutchen]

You can never say never. Right. But. But I think what. Because of the way that he Frames it. It's just if paranormal events and phenomena seem to be governed, governed by these archetypes and these tendencies down to, as we were alluding to with Lou, down to the organizations that study them. So the trickster archetype is liminal, guardian of the threshold boundaries. It upends the status quo. It's social leveling. So the higher brought low and the lower brought high. It's transgressive, it is playful, it is mischievous. It encodes wisdom in the grossest of spaces. P.K. dick's insight from the trash stratum or the philosopher's stone and the head of a toad. Right. From, from, from the dross of society you'll find wisdom and insight. Trickster figures, Hermes, Loki, Till Oil and Spiegel that I mentioned earlier. Reynard the fox. Rabbit from African cosmologies, Coyote from indigenous American cosmologies.

[Interviewer]

Rare rabbit.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, Rabbit, yep. And

[Interviewer]

so this is an evil, this is just, this is necessary chaos.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It's rehab.

[Interviewer]

It's rehab.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It's rehab.

[Interviewer]

I hadn't thought of that. But that works.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. And so what it does is it fulfills this necessary role. And that's one of the things that Hanson points to, is the fact that trickster phenomena, the trickster archetype, loves to self negate. So it'll show you one thing, maybe a predictable pattern of behavior. And just when you think you've got it, it'll pull the rug out from underneath you. Right. It will set you up. It relishes an absurdity, which is arguably what high strangeness is. Right. It's anti structural. That's the big thing. To the stars. Academy of Arts and Science. I always thought this sounded like a Montessori school, but it kind of does. But, but like this, it's the same thing. And like, you know, the late Jeff Ritzman, who was an incredible thinker, sort of saw that when that, when that announcement was made. He's like, this is going to fall apart. Because that's what trickster theory says it does. And of course, of course it did. So I don't think you can ever get out in front of this thing. That sort of anti structural self negating aspect I is best exemplified in the contactees or some people who've had poltergeist interactions. Something genuinely anomalous will happen to someone, then they'll be asked to perform and they'll have to start faking it and eventually that leads to, oh, it was fake all along.

[Interviewer]

Right, Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

That's Uri Geller and spoon bending, you know, or as my friend Sarai Ascath on Where did the Road Go? Says like, just because I can, just because I can fake a punch in a movie doesn't mean that all punches are fake. But neither here nor there. But, but, but this idea that like to be. Greg Bishop, my mentor, says these phenomena are repeatable but not on demand.

[Interviewer]

That's right where Hansen said, you can't photograph it.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Right? You can't. And if you, or you can photograph it, but you're gonna get something back that's going to make you seem even less reputable. Right.

[Interviewer]

That makes me think of the epigraph from Swedenborg that.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Right. You shouldn't trust spirits. And because they're lie to you, always lie to you. Yeah. And again, we're losing, using these terms loosely, like spirits means the other, whatever that is. Like. But this, these phenomenon seem, seem to lie to you. It's the reason that we always have that punchline of, of UFOs only abducting rednecks. Right? Which isn't true. But it's that idea of that sort of marginalization and disreputability that we sort of have associated with, with the, with the phenomenon. So yeah, these groups to study it always fall apart. Attempts to study it always fall apart. Again, this is partially because it's not reliable. And I again am positioning a, I'm proposing a meta position intelligence. But it's also due to the fact that like, you're never going to get IRB approval to put someone through a near death experience. You know, this, this, this, these sort of things happen. They're associated with trauma, like they really are. And so you're not going to do that in the lab. You're just not going to. It's like saying, let's, you know, let's measure tidal fluctuations in a bathtub or something. Like it's just not going to happen. Or as Jeff Kreibel says, going to Antarctica and saying where are the zebras? You know, it's like you're looking in the wrong place, right?

[Interviewer]

Because there's no zebras here. So zebras don't exist.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Right. And it's also Christ in the wilderness with Satan, right? Satan's like, do this, do this, do this. He's like, no, because that's not the environment in which this happens. Like you, you can't be asked to do. That's why, it's why maybe if a psychic needed to predict lottery numbers to save their life, they could do it. But that's why you don't get Psychics predicting lottery numbers.

[Interviewer]

That's right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And I'm doing George's work such a disservice because it's such a profound book. It is dense and it's difficult to read through. But once you start to see that, you're like, oh, I can kind of see the way that a lot of the shape of a lot of these

[Interviewer]

things, I think, why does the act of dying seem to be. Or the nexus of dying seem to be the center of all of this? What is it about death. Death and UFOs.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. I joke that the things that you can't talk about are what used to be sex and religion. Right. Or sex and politics. Sex, religion, politics. Sex, religion and politics and UFOs. But I repeat myself, right? Yeah. I. I don't know. I mean, is this. Is this where we're going to segue into Ecology of Souls? Because. Yes, because once you. Once you draw back the string on that, the arrow goes flying.

[Interviewer]

Let her fly.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Okay.

[Interviewer]

Souls is worth. I mean, it's a thousand. It's two volumes.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It's 250,000 words. And it's got a separate volume just for appendices and endnotes and the bibliography. And I hate that it's that long. But the idea was to write a quaint little book on UFOs and death. And then it was like to explain that I have to have all this preamble. And it just seemed like I needed to. To do the topic justice. I think that to your original question, that death keeps on cropping up because we're kind of misinterpreting what that moment is, what that NDE moment is. I just think it's one expression of these threshold moments. Right. What I mean by that is this is why I asked if we're going to go off into Ecology of Souls territory. I had always been haunted by a statement from Ann Strieber, Whitley Strieber's wife. They were collecting correspondence in the wake of communion. Probably one of the only places that you could write at the time if you're an experiencer. And Anne was making some notes from the correspondence. And one of the things that she noted that Whitley labor later related was, this has something to do with what we call death. Now, what we call death, I think is a great little haunting phrase in and of it is. But I heard that and I was like, well, what do you do with that? Because again, there's what I want the phenomena to be. Right. I really do want there to be fairies at the bottom of the garden. Like I do. I think that's cool. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

But you don't want there to be little green men from Zeta.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, I mean, yeah, I just want it to be numinous and weird. But I guess what I'm saying is like there's what I want it to be and there's what I think the evidence is pointing towards. And there's a part of me inside that doesn't want this to be about death and about all. Just us and projections of us and drawing us into it. But, but there's a lot of evidence in that regard. So I took, I thought about Ann's statement and a lot of people have talked about this in passing. And I also thought about some other researchers who I thought have done impeccable work. Somebody who doesn't get nearly enough attention is Thomas Bullard. Eddie Bullard wrote UFOs Measure of a Mystery back in the 80s, which at the time was like the most comprehensive collection of alien abductions, made extensive comparisons between UFO experiences and shamanic initiation. Now we can unpack the problematism behind that term shamanism specific to, you know, Siberia, etc. Etc. But just shamanic figures in their communities, in their respective communities, which we might call medicine men or women or early religions. Yeah, just, just let's sub substitute any culture specific term for that intercessor with the spirit world.

[Host]

Sure.

[Joshua Cutchen]

He drew a lot of comparisons between UFO experiences and shamanic experiences in terms of the symbolism, in terms of the spaces that were they were going to. Most notably in terms of the dismemberment that people would have in shamanic initiations.

[Interviewer]

Dismemberment, yeah.

[Joshua Cutchen]

So there's this idea that you would go to the spirit world and you would be taken apart and put back together again better and then come back to serve your people. Similarly, you know, one of the scholars of Mercy, one of the scholars of shamanism, that is historically the most looked at. Looked at. Mercia Eliade talked about certain traditions, talking about the shamanic initiation being given by the spirits, a crystal in their head to facilitate communication. You see where this is going. All very salient points. So we've got Anne and the death and we've got Bullard and the shamanic initiation. And then you enter Kenneth Ring into the equation who wrote the Project Omega, which talked about the similarity between UFO experiences and near death experiences.

[Interviewer]

And I have this reading list for everybody.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Okay.

[Interviewer]

Yes, it's a long, it's a long fluid ring. It's all here.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And that's undeniable too in a lot of Ways, they're. They're narratives of ascent as. As Diana Pasoka would call them.

[Interviewer]

This DMT experience track with this, that ego, death.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, we can put a pin in that for a moment. I'll get there, I'll get there. This part of this equation too. This part of my cork board with the red yarn.

[Interviewer]

A jazz guy's riffing.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I let him riff. I'm not. I usually lose my way before the solo is done, but. So tunnel. Oops, sorry. So tunnel Experience. Themes of ascension, of lifting up, going to certain spaces. Like, there are a lot of descriptions of alien worlds that sound like afterlife meadows and such. People have. Have seen aliens and near death experiences. More often than not, they see beings of light, but that. That's been revealed as one of the more common yet underreported entities seen aboard craft. And alien experiences are beings of light. So that's transferable there.

[Interviewer]

Absolutely true.

[Joshua Cutchen]

That's Ray Hernandez's free study. His stuff that he did on that. They show that beings of light were really common. So, like, all these things are starting to play well together. Then you do enter. See, I told you. I get there. You do enter into the dmt. In the altered states of consciousness space.

[Interviewer]

Scripture has quite a few passages about beings of light. Sorry, scripture, Beings of light.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, the light imagery is everywhere, all over it. My, My good friend and editor Barbara Fisher, who runs the Six Degrees of John Keel podcast, is making me work, work on a book about lights. And it's like the toughest thing I've ever done, but I love it. Love you, Barbara, but it's tough, but yeah, that's one of the things. Like you look through scripture and it's just like. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Interviewer]

UFO story.

[Joshua Cutchen]

But the DMT entheogen sort of space, a lot of those were interpreted or thought of as being vectors for talking with the dead. Right. To the extent that, you know, you could translate ayahuasca as vine of the spirits or vine of the dead. That's just one example among many. Iboga. You see similar descriptions about accessing the spirit world. Terence McKenna said that, you know, he thought of DMT as bungee cording into the bardo.

[Interviewer]

Have you ever tried it?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Me? No. I'm too chicken to do it. I just, I can't break through. Well, and you know, in, in, in the, on the back side of recovery, I'm like, is this a really good idea? I don't know.

[Interviewer]

I wouldn't call it recreation.

[Joshua Cutchen]

No, I wouldn't either. But, you know, I'm, I'm Sort of, you know. Again, I think it does come to me just being too scared to do it because I have some friends have been like, I never see fairies. They're like, well, I can fix that for you if you really want me to. It's like, well maybe, you know, and then I start thinking about, you know, you know, blood pressure and all sorts of different things that, comorbidities anyway.

[Interviewer]

But the wood elves and I mean, it's all the same story.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, I mean, yeah. And there, there are allusions to people being taken apart and put together under ayahuasca by little beings. So it's, it all starts to sound the same. Then you say, okay, well the shamanic initiations oftentimes take you to the land of the ancestors, or at least to or past the point of death, a near death experience, and bring you back with powers. Near death experiencers come back with supposedly abilities of clairvoyance and precognition and all sorts of things. UFO experiencers have this happen too. People don't talk about it enough. True monocle. These people all experienced poltergeist effects. Vallee said it was the rule rather than the exception that experiencers had poltergeist effects in their lives after their sightings. So we've got, we're checking this shamanic initiation box, we're checking the near death experience box, we're checking the UFO box. Going to, we're were kind of checking the DMT box to a degree. Mario Kitness and David Lukes did a study that showed that a lot of people who use, have used psychoactive substances have reported an uptick in things like spontaneous out of body experiences and poltergeist effects and such like that. And trips to fairyland. A tunnel like if you go to. I had the privilege of the second honeymoon. The first honeymoon was to Blue Ridge or drunkenly. I drunkenly summoned Bigfoot. The second honeymoon was. The second honeymoon was to Ireland. And just to have a sense of place and to go there and to go these places and really be like, oh, that's what this is all about. A lot of these ferry forts include these subterranean passages called su terrains which are these. It's not really known entirely what they were. They were used for perhaps storage, perhaps for hiding. But some of them stretch for miles underground. And so it's very similar to the idea of you reading a lot of these fairy stories. Like other person went through a tunnel to fairyland, tunnel experience to a pastoral locale. That's the near death experience. The tunnel experience is the beam of light that the UFO takes you on, the tunnel experiences prefigured in some of the shamanic stuff as well. So it all starts to kind of play together. But then you've got to say, okay, well, are these all crossing over to the afterlife depending on your spiritual tradition and coming back? Because it doesn't. I have a hard. I can do that with a shamanic thing, right? I can say that people, initiates are taken past the point of death and brought back because that stretches back into classical traditions. And I can do that obviously with near death experiences. It's baked right there into the name. I can do that with fairyland because fairies are this association with the dead. I have trouble doing that with the UFO thing and I have trouble doing that with all the, all the altered states of consciousness entheogen thing. So I would posit rather that we have these threshold events. Thresholds, tricksters. We have these threshold events where we go and we come back different. And I don't know what that other space is. If you really are still in 2026 holding on to materialism, that's fine, you know, whatever, we'll wait it out. And you really want to say that these are other dimensions, that's fine. I can meet you there. I can meet you there. But we've been talking about it for thousands of years. It's, it's the other world, it's Tiernanog, it's Oz, it's Middle Earth, it's the imagination, I think it's all these things. And if you go there and you come back, you survive that ordeal. It's the hero's journey, right? You come back with these abilities that I can't explain. But if you do spend time with this cohort, we were talking about this a little bit earlier, you do start to notice these, these strange things happening around them, that you're like that. You know, as someone who hasn't had, I've had my death and rebirth experience, I guess, but someone who's never had an alien abduction or a near death experience per se, or any of these things, it's like this doesn't happen to me all the time. And this happens to you. And it really does seem to. I'm observing these, this, this cloud of strangeness around you. And so that's sort of what I tried to do with Ecology of Souls, to answer your question 30 minutes later is to put all these things in dialogue with each other and to make them play together. Because all true narratives must reconcile, right?

[Interviewer]

They must.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And I see Too much worth preserving in the work of Bullard and the work of Ring. Too many similarities to the fairy stuff in the work of Valet. I'm like, okay, well, how do these things all have to play together? I think it's the death thing. I really do. I just don't think we know what death is.

[Interviewer]

We don't know what death is.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Why wouldn't it be birth instead?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, that's. That's an interesting idea that, you know, is sort of alluded to. If you look at, I believe it's the work of Crofton Croaker. Some of those old dusty fairy folklore volumes. They'll make allusions to things like the fairies would laugh at funerals and cry at births. Or there are also allusions to fairyland being summer when it's winter. Over here, it's a place of inversions, you see. Inversions again, that's trickster, topsy turvy sort of stuff again. But this illusion of inversion. So that's an idea that. I mean, even Charles Fort played this idea. You know, we are the ones who are truly dead and.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

He's so eloquent, I can't even paraphrase him. But he was like, we are the ones who are truly dead. We've emerged from this, you know, we will someday emerge from this cloudy pseudo existence into, you know, the true. The true light of our actual, actual lives.

[Interviewer]

I hope he's right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I hope he's right, too. And I. I think that he's. Even. Even if I wasn't, I didn't have my own faith background, I think I would still say that he's right. Right. I think that there are certain hills that I will and won't die on. The Psy. Phenomena Hill is. Is one that I will die on. I wasn't aware until I watched your interview with. I guess it was Eric, that the Daryl Bim stuff had been replicated. Yep. So you've got. That. You've got some of Dean Raiden's work,

[Interviewer]

but there's some tricksters in with. With BEM as well.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. I mean, because.

[Interviewer]

Okay, because initially he couldn't be replicated.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Right.

[Interviewer]

And they couldn't really understand it, but it has been since.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, and that's. That's where you sort of invite in Rupert Sheldrake through the back door. Right. With morphic resonance. So Rupert Sheldrake, biologist and parapsychologist.

[Interviewer]

That's the episode that I'm releasing tomorrow.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Okay, then I'll keep my mouth shut. Just watch that episode. But yeah, but yeah, exciting because. So was this, Was this, Was this possible? Was this possible until. Was this possible until, until Daryl Bim broke the seal, Right?

[Interviewer]

I don't know.

[Joshua Cutchen]

For the, for the pre sentiment studies.

[Interviewer]

Well, now you have to talk about Sheldrake.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Okay, so Sheldrake's idea was that among his many ideas because he'd done some really interesting work on pet telepathy and whatnot. But the idea that there's a thing that he coined as morphic resonance, which is basically the first time something gets done, it's easier to get done later. Rats in a maze on the west coast. Running the maze first will have a more difficult time than rats on the west coast because something about the collective unconscious maybe of that species has learned how to maze well. Right?

[Interviewer]

Yes. So nature, nature has memory.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. And if you look at like sports, it's. That seems to be the case.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Because records are bro. It's like nobody's ever gonna break this record. And then that record's broken and the, the bar keeps on getting raised higher and people keep on meeting it. But I, I will die on the. Because of people like Sheldrake and like Bim and like Dean Raiden who have been especially Raiden trying to play by the rules of, of laboratory experiments. That's a hill I'll die on. But the, the near death stuff is, is I'm close. I'm not. I don't know if I'm dying on that hill, but I'm definitely being like mortally wounded on that hill. You know what I mean?

[Interviewer]

Okay, that's fair. What about the reincarnation hill?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, that's a good one too. I mean, you know, because there's, there's good research. There's great research on it. There's University of Virginia, the Jeffrey Long believe. I used to be able to spout this name off the top of my head. But there's really compelling stuff. You know, with my boys, I was kind of hoping that they would say something to me about a past life before age 7. Also, they're identical twins, so kind of like wanted to do those twin experiments, but no twin telepathy either. Either. But yeah, I mean the, the reincarnation thing I think is part of it too. You know, that's where I break with traditional Christianity. Although I think there are ways you can sort of, you can sort of blur the, the lines to make it fit. But I think you can. I think you can. I think you can. I mean, and, and just. I get so tired of I mean, I'm probably rambling, so I apologize. But I find the reincarnation stuff to be much more compelling than the criticisms of it. So I get so tired of these low resolution interpretations. It's like, well, why are there more people on Earth now than there ever have been? I'm like, well, how many waves can be on the ocean? You know, how come five people said that they were Napoleon at my dinner party in their past life? Well, I don't know. Maybe they'll have a fifth of Napoleon. Like, I don't know, Like, I like the idea of using the water cycle as an as sure. As an analog for the reincarnation process. You all get dumped into a soup and then you get spread around. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And researchers like Raymond Moody have addressed that is that soul energy could be broken off into pieces.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, I think so.

[Interviewer]

I think so too.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And that, you know, that might be what we experience when we meet soulmates, you know, as we. We see a spark of that other thing that's inside of us or even people that you just get along with. You know, there's some people that you get along with right from the start. There's some people that you kind of don't want to be around, you know, like you.

[Interviewer]

But that's Moody's work as well, is these soul groups. And you just hit it off with somebody.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, 100.

[Interviewer]

And you're just going through the experience together.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I mean, you've had these experiences with people where, like, no matter what you say, they're not picking up any of your references. And, like, you have to explain all your aside jokes. You're like, well, I should have never made that joke because now I'm having to explain it. And it's just, you know, awkward all the way down. There are a couple musicians that I work with, and I love them, but it's the same way. It's like, well, you know, maybe. Maybe we are. Our Venn diagram of soul pieces does

[Interviewer]

not mean that's true. As a former stand up, I've played to rooms where nobody.

[Joshua Cutchen]

True, I bet. Yeah. So that's Ecology of Souls. I mean, so. So the idea. So so. But see, you see all that you have to get to to before you can have that UFO conversation.

[Interviewer]

Right. And we're not really connecting it with that. I'm sorry, we're not really connecting UFOs with death yet.

[Joshua Cutchen]

No, I mean, this is just the preamble, which is why it got split into. Into two things. And you mean we as a culture or we in this Room.

[Interviewer]

Really?

[Host]

All of it?

[Joshua Cutchen]

I mean, yeah, it's, I can't make

[Interviewer]

the connection, but I, but I feel like there's something to it.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I mean, let me expand a little bit more.

[Interviewer]

We've got the, the narrative, the nuts and bolts, the aerospace. But I think you have even brought to everyone's attention that we're seeing more experiences that are spiritual and less that are abduction.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Right.

[Interviewer]

Like the narrative is changing culturally.

[Joshua Cutchen]

That's what the phenomenon does. I think the late Earl Gray Anderson, head of SoCal MUFON, said that before he passed away, said that he was noticing that a lot of these narratives in the UFO phenomenon are shifting more towards like downloads, astral traveling, consciousness excursions, structured craft, or shifting a lot towards more lights in the sky. Yes. I'm of multiple thoughts about this. One of them is that as we globalize and we get, we lose our cultural idiosyncrasies, we're seeing a truer, more stripped down version of the phenomenon. Right. So instead of seeing, I don't know, a flying chariot or a flying saucer, we just see the light that was there all along. Right. Because, because culture is not as distinct as it once was in a globalized era.

[Interviewer]

Right. I mean before Ken, Kenneth Arnold said saucers, it's misinterpreted. He didn't see any saucers.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, they're like batwing chevron sort of things. Yeah, but, but then we, well now we're in fourth wall, phantoms territory.

[Interviewer]

We can't get there. We're not there yet.

[Joshua Cutchen]

People still, people ended up seeing saucers. But so, but yeah, so we'll go

[Interviewer]

to break, we'll come back. But if you want to make a point, do it.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, I would just say that. So the phenomenon seems to be, seems to change and adapt. It seems to continue to be changing and adapting. Even disclosure, for better or worse, has changed and adapt. There are people talking about things, aspects of the phenomenon that you didn't used to hear. The people in that audience in those hearings read some very strange books, let's just say that. And it's almost as if the front facing effort to get people to acknowledge UFOs is giving them the most palatable version. Here are the nutsy boltsy things. We won't quite talk about the psionics and the extended consciousness and the death connection because you want to talk about something that would really be catastrophic. Disclosure. It would be the death connection.

[Interviewer]

Of course, but you know, they're tracking that and researching it.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Always have been, 100% some stuff that I hate when people talk about insider knowledge, but I just don't want to be, gosh, gauche or anything and say something. But anyway, people are reading weird books on this stuff. People are authoring weird books on this stuff who are at the forefront of the disclosure movement. Right. And I think that we are going to continue to see this get weirder and weirder and weirder if this current disclosure effort takes root. And look, it's gotten farther than I ever thought it would this time. So we'll see.

[Interviewer]

By the time this comes out, I think everyone's going to be disappointed.

[Joshua Cutchen]

They probably are. They probably are. Yeah. But I'm trying to be, I'm trying to be optimistic. I mean, like, you know, there was a time when I would have said nothing would happen, but opinions like that age like milk. So true.

[Interviewer]

All right, we'll come back, we'll talk about fiction bleeding into reality. Fourth wall. Jeffrey Kripal said that that book saved your life.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

How does that work?

[Joshua Cutchen]

The gateway and the sort of germ of what became fourth wall Phantoms is part of what saved my life. And the lessons that grew into fourth wall were what saved my life. So it was during that rehab stint. I had no idea what I was getting into. You know, I'm a little child of privilege. These are not my people in rehab. You know, they are my people, by the way. But, you know, how do you find your way to navigate through this? You know, because they're guys, you know, they're guys who are, I learned this. They're, they're crunching up goldfish and putting hot sauce on them. So it's like, oh, you've done, you've done time, apparently. That's a thing. That's, that, that's the thing.

[Interviewer]

So that was your first stint?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

On your last. God. God willing, yeah.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Knock on wood. But how does, how does a Josh Cutchen, in all of his fart sniffing, hoity toity sort of way, how does he serve? How does he, how does he navigate that and how does he survive that? After acknowledging that these are your people, in comes Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, really, to say. Yeah, so I, I journal. I filled up like two journals in the time that I was there. Just writing, writing, writing. I got known as the, the writing guy.

[Interviewer]

How long did you do?

[Host]

30.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I did like 12.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I should have done 30, but I should have done 30. But we're also six years later, so. Right. I don't know. You know, but what really helped me was, was trying to, trying to pinpoint where I was at in the hero's journey. Because this is not the way life is supposed to go. Right. You're not supposed to wind your way in, wind up in, you know, a sort of prison esque sort of vibe, you know.

[Interviewer]

So you're in, in the cave, searching for the elixir.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, yeah. What was the belly of the whale? Okay, it was the belly of the whale. And then what do you do after you get out of that? Like what, what does slaying the dragon mean? You know, does it. Because this isn't a dragon that you slay. Right. You don't. It's got to look different than that. So it was by leaning into archetypes and finding and leaning into that sort of hero's journey thing and finding strength in Those synchronicities with St. Moses and all that stuff, it really felt like something was plugged in and saying, you know, this, this, this matters. You know, this is, this is the way out if you, if you do it right. And to quite frankly toss aside that connection to whatever this other thing is, which was so, so tangible, weeping up and weeping back like that was to toss aside everything that you learned from, from interacting with the divine, to go back out there and do your thing back to the way you were just seemed like it was. It wasn't just bad for me. It wasn't just bad for my family. Wasn't just disappointing. It was blasphemous is really what it felt like.

[Interviewer]

You felt like you turned your back on God?

[Joshua Cutchen]

It felt like it would have, or rather more to the point of the lessons that. That evolved into Fourth Wall Phantoms. It would have been. It would have been making a shitty story. Right. It would have been going against that narrative direction that, that empty riverbed, that dried riverbed that Jung talked about. It would have been like not following that. Like, I think that God, the universe, if you're more inclined, wants you to follow some of these paths. They're paths of least resistance that are sometimes the best paths for you.

[Interviewer]

Totally agree.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And if you can learn and listen and lean in those moments, then things will turn out for the better. So the entire introduction to Fourth Wall Phantoms is me navel gazing and sharing my rehab experience. But just to. Just to show that these ideas have, have real stakes. And I think when you expand those up to the macro level, to the societal level, I think they have even deeper stakes about the stories that we tell ourselves, about the cynicism and dystopia that we've sort of been reveling in. I mean, honestly, like, don't get me wrong, I love. I love irony and you know, that Robert Downey Jr. Esque snark as much as the next person. But there's something inauthentic about it, I think.

[Interviewer]

Well, then this is a detour I want to take.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Usually an author's first novel, they can't help but reveal a lot of themselves. So them old ways never died. 20, 23 is a musician in rural Georgia having experiences difficult relationships and struggling with alcoholism.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. A musician in North Georgia. Yeah. I call it my Appalachian Addiction goblin trauma drama.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. So are you. Was it Robert Coulter?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, Rick Coulter.

[Interviewer]

Rick Coulter.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Robert Coulter is actually the name of the TUA player in Atlanta. He wrote me. He's like, oh, that was me. And I'm like, no, it wasn't you. It's Rick Coulter. It's Rick Coulter.

[Interviewer]

So what are you working out in that novel?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, so the pre and post rehab experience was sort of trending towards looking at fiction in general. So prior to. During the pandemic, I was putting together a collection of essays that I was editing and contributing to, but editing of. Of people whom I admired about fairies in film and how certain films talk about fairy folklore in authentic ways. And then after rehab, it was the novel, which was me processing, which sort of pointed me in the direction towards Fourth Wall Phantoms, which is non fiction about fiction. Right. And in the novel. Yeah. I mean, sometimes I feel kind of sheepish about it because it's like, thank you for attending and reading my therapy sess. But, you know, I always. I always wanted.

[Interviewer]

But you needed to do that.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I absolutely needed to. I mean, I wanted to so much. So much of that book is pulled straight out of my rehab journals. It really is phrases and stuff that people said to me and stuff like that. I also wanted to see if I could write a novel. You know, my favorite fiction is. Is, yeah, there's the monster. But the monster also symbolizes something. You know, there's something going on under the hood, so to speak, with the monster. I thought that, you know, a generational fairy curse kind of looks a lot like addiction, you know, and alien abductions kind of look like hangovers. You know, post alien, you wake up in your dry mouth and you don't know where your pants are and you can't remember what happened last night after a certain point.

[Interviewer]

Well, how does Rick Coulter change at the end of the novel?

[Joshua Cutchen]

He realizes that he doesn't have to be perfect. He makes peace with who he is in terms of who he was told he was versus who he truly is. And he, he's not as self centered as he is at the start. But to do that he has to give up something that's very important to him, which is the same thing that I gave up. That was very important to me. And you know, I, I just got done going through the audiobook version of it with, with Micah Hanks and you know, there's some stuff I'd probably change, but at the end of the day, it really does encapsulate. I say that Ecology of Souls has my head in it and Fourth Wall has my soul in it, but I think them old ways never died. Has my heart in it in terms of the relationship that I developed with those characters and how they have taken me through my journey in the time sense. Now look, another aspect of writing the novel was sort of pragmatic. I'd heard these stories even from real straight laced atheist materialist friends of mine who are authors, that it's like, yeah, you write in a book and if you have really well developed character, they won't let you do stuff.

[Interviewer]

That's true.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Can you say that again for the people in the back? Like, what are you.

[Interviewer]

That's true.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It's true. It's totally true.

[Interviewer]

Follow them where they go.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And I started wondering what that was. And I wanted to experience a little bit of that. I did get a little bit of that. Not too much, but I got a little bit of that. So it was again part of this journey that I was progressing on towards what would end up becoming Fourth Wall Phantoms.

[Interviewer]

You've heard Stephen King say methodology pkd. Did you feel like you were writing inspired, Channeled? Channeled?

[Joshua Cutchen]

There was one, there was one chapter especially that needed substantive revisions. And it wasn't the sense of like, oh, Josh, you messed this up. You didn't do. It was like. Because when I rewrote it, it was like, oh, no, just the transmission was garbled. Like that was. Was that sense. It was like, no, this is coming in in a much more fluid way. This is the way it always should have been. Right? So it was very much that sort of sense. And it, you know, back to what you were talking about, like, you know, it's one of my favorite things that Stephen King has said. I think he originally said it in Bag of Bones, but I think character is an author saying like, you know, the real work happens with the boys in the basement, the blue collar work in the boiler room, the deep of your subconscious. That's where the story really takes place and takes form. And I have my own version of that, which is I do the best writing between the desk and the fridge, which is so true. The number of times I've been like, I can't figure out how to say this, this. And then I go up and it's not necessarily the desk in the fridge. Right. But, like, what the point is, like, whenever I go and do something else for like, even if it's going getting up to go to the bathroom or do something with one of the boys that they need or to say. Say something to my wife, that's when it's like, I get so frustrated because I'm as. As I'm about to accomplish the thing that I got up to do. That's when the perfect phrase enters my head. I'm like, just hold on and like, rush back and write it down, then come back.

[Interviewer]

The muse fighting with the trickster.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. Very similar.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Hold on a minute.

[Interviewer]

That's okay.

[Joshua Cutchen]

There we go.

[Interviewer]

From everything I've read about, felt like a story of forgiveness and you forgiving yourself.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, it definitely is a big. There's a lot of stuff that I end up working out in myself. There's some relationships, some father son dynamics that weren't father son dynamics. There are grandfather grandson dynamics in that book. But yeah, a lot of it was that. And just trying to find a way to commemorate not only my time struggling with what I struggle with and I guess continue to struggle with, but also, quite frankly, to commemorate what a lot of musicians went through during the pandemic. I was fortunate enough to have music and my writing, which I. To this day, I'm so glad that I can switch back and forth between the two, because I used completely different parts of my brain. But, you know, a lot of my friends who were just performers didn't really have that. And it was a. It was a painful thing to watch

[Interviewer]

happen, really was to come to fourth wall phantoms. It's. You've got all this nonfiction which essentially is not provable.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Right. Speculative nonfiction. There used to be a spot in Borders back when Borders bookstores were a thing that said speculative nonfiction. And I love that.

[Interviewer]

I did, too. So it's this nonfiction. So it's true, but it can't be proved. And then we've got your fiction novel, which is heavily researched.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, well, it's. It's part of it was trying to say what would happen if you were faithful to fairy folklore in fiction, because that doesn't happen very.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

So that was Part of that attempt.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. So fourth wall comes is born from the novel. It feels like this sort of meta commentary.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It was. It was. It was that trajectory that I was talking about. So looking at. Well, let's kind of. Let's kind of say how. How loyal some fictions are. Okay. Let's kind of write your own fiction. And then this was like, how does we know how the phenomenon affects fiction? How does fiction affect the phenomenon? And I think that plays nicely with some of some of the ideas in Ecology of Souls. You know, one of the biggest bits of pushback that I get to some of the ideas in ecology is that we have crash retrievals, we have bodies, et cetera, et cetera.

[Interviewer]

And you don't buy that?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Not necessarily. I just think that. I'm just not entirely sure that. Well, I always have to leave the door open to not buying that. Right. Because media, you do mediated narratives and stuff.

[Interviewer]

You're open to it. But something smells.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Something smells. And I think that there might be a way of looking at this that both scratches that crash retrieval itch and takes a look at how weird and slippery the phenomenon can be. So to sort of launch into that, there is that idea that I mentioned to you about authors saying that their characters tell them what they can and can't do. And I really want to sort of explore that. And as it turns out, it's not an outlier. A lot of authors have had this happen to varying degrees of corporeality. Let's say Einrich Ibsen said that he met Nora from a Doll's House. Dickens had some experiences like this. Most famously Alan Moore and John Constantine. He was sitting in a sandwich shop in London and says that somebody walked through the door that looked just like John. And they sort of acknowledge each other. Other people who've worked on the Hellblazer title have. Have also supposedly interacted with John Constantine.

[Interviewer]

So this is fiction starting to bleed

[Joshua Cutchen]

over, fiction bleeding over into life. There's an entire wonderful book called Embodied Imaginations by Chiddonbram Ramesh on this. And it goes into, like, stats, into statistics on authors that have experienced this. But there are some. Got them on the iPad. But.

[Interviewer]

Well, when Alan Moore's Constantine walks through the door, is it from the 80s? Is it the 2014? Is there a canonical character?

[Joshua Cutchen]

He said that it looks. In the interview, which is originally in Wizard Magazine, he said it looked just like Sting. Actually, that's not true. It looked like Constantine because he based Constantine Austin.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

But he says it looked like him. And so I guess it was the full trench coat garb. And it wasn't too far after his introduction in Swamp Thing, if memory serves. But this is something that tons of people, I mean, Alice Walker, Color Purple, had some experiences too, where her characters, like, actually, as she put it, would sit down and sit on the couch and talk with her. So these go all the way from intuited senses of what your characters would and wouldn't like to do through oral hallucinations to visual, quote, unquote hallucinations. And apparently it's very common. There was a study that was conducted at the Edinburgh Book Festival that found that indeed, it's some pretty staggering numbers. I don't have the stats on the top of my head, but this is something that authors experience quite a bit and creatives in general will tend to experience. And so it occurred to me, like, what happens when you put that in dialogue with the UFO phenomenon or with these other things? And it has been done. And I'll get back around to the crash retrieval bit that I mentioned earlier, but it has been done. Two people who I think are done, have done great work in this regard are Bertrand Mayust and Martin Cotmire. Mayust took a look at pre Kenneth Arnold, citing sci fi pulps and saw that especially even. Even when there was a division between the pulps in France and the pulps in America. The UFO sightings and what would become alien abductions, all featured elements from these that apparently first appeared in these pulp magazines. Right. You know, Martin Cotmire has done the same thing. Classic example that I think he did really good work on is that the first instance of a UFO stopping a vehicle or interfering with electronics was actually, again in science fiction short stories, mad scientist from another planet plunges the New York City power grid into. Into a blackout for ransom or something like that. That appears before any of that other stuff. So there seems to be some sort of interplay between, I would call it a dialogue loop between the phenomenon and our expectations and our fictions that feeds into itself and actually appears in these experiences, then goes round and around and around, around, around we go. I think you could probably follow that, that sort of dance all the way back to petroglyphs, you know, and at which point, like, what is a petroglyph? Is it art? Is it life? I really don't know. But people have seen aliens that look like they're out of movies, like describing, like, oh, I saw Jawas. You know, it's like, what do you do with that? Or. Or craft that look like, you know, My favorite, the, my favorite Martian spaceship. And like the knee jerk reaction is to throw those in the waste bin. But as we sort of talked about in the beginning of our conversation, like, I hate that, you know, and look, I'm not saying that we're not dealing with, with mental illness and we're not dealing with hoaxers, but I have also talked to some people, some experiences with who I'm very close, who have said that. Yeah, you know, my own personal fictions that I was writing as a kid showed up during the time of my, you know, my UFO experiences.

[Interviewer]

Is this the trickster changing costume to be culturally acceptable?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Is it the trickster? Is it screen memories? You know, I don't really know what a screen memory is. Even after all this time in this field. Like, it's just sort of thrown out there. It's like, oh, the screen memory fairy glamour, you know.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

But yeah, it's adapting to our expectations. I think there's, there's a good part of that.

[Interviewer]

I mean, well, people will see something and like, did you see that? I didn't see anything, but I did.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, and that gets to this sort of weirder way that reality seems to pick up, seems to pick up our fictions in general. I mean, Cottonmire at one point was talking about how he threw out a UFO report because it featured lithium crystals. And that sounded too much like dilithium crystals, but now we have lithium batteries. So like, I don't, you know, I don't know where these lines intersect, but obviously you can see where this starts to interface with Eric's retro causality.

[Interviewer]

I was just thinking of that.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. So the question is thinking of Bob Lazar, retro causality or manifestation? That's, that's, that's at the root of it, which have this great anecdote in Fourth Wall Phantoms where I was playing a video game. Alan Wake 2. Because the remedy Studio does great stuff and the entire. One of the main thrusts of that video game is retro causality or manifestation. Really in the middle of writing this book, I'm reading like a, you know, a collectible in the game that's talking about this.

[Interviewer]

If this happens. How, you know, how do you bring up Sheldrake where nobody's heard of Shell Drake while I'm writing that episode?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, I mean, yeah, it's, there's something, Come on. There's something in the. Well, so another weird thing that happened to me was like, I was like, okay, this is weird that I'm playing this game. As I started writing this book. And I'm brushing my teeth a couple days later, and for some reason, the sort of inversion of a common phrase pops into my head and it says, if you can't join them, beat him. I'm like, I don't know why that popped into my head, but I tried to, like, is that insightful at all? If you can't join them, beat him. I guess, maybe. And then literally that same night, I sit down to play some of the dlc and one of the characters says, you can't join them, beat him. And I'm like, what the. So that was like. For me, that was reality saying, okay, look, Josh, sometimes it is retro causality.

[Interviewer]

It's.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Sure, it's gotta be. But. But, you know, I think that if you look at. I think that I would prefer that there be a version of this that is manifestation, because this is all manifestation. Right? I mean, you know, somebody, somebody decided to design this and it was in their head at some point and they, they carved it and they molded it and now it literally is made manifest. This is, this is like, you know, a cult. Occultism 101.

[Interviewer]

Sure.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And so, you know, you put that alongside of all the creatives who talk about ideas coming to them as opposed to them coming up with ideas. Quote, apocryphally attributed to Jung. Also attributed to Hillman was people don't have ideas. Ideas have people. If you've ever been involved in a creative process, you know that this has happened to you at some point.

[Interviewer]

Very much so, yeah. In fact, I some. I wait for it.

[Joshua Cutchen]

That's a great idea to sort of like set. Not a trap or an ambush, but like to sort of put yourself. I mean, that might be what the use of. Of drugs in these situations is.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It's just making yourself receptive to these ideas that come floating along.

[Interviewer]

Like some, some writers just want to smoke pot when they write. I can't do that.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Right.

[Interviewer]

But that just makes them open to the news, which I 100 totally believe in.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, I totally believe in it too. You know, Tolkien thought that he exhumed Middle Earth more than. More than inventing it. So PL Traverse, who wrote Mary Poppins, who was a mentor of Whitley's, actually talked about ideas coming along as like these little balloon ideas, these free floating balloons that you sometimes grabbed hold of of.

[Interviewer]

Excuse me, where do those ideas come from? Do they come from the collective consciousness or is that retro causality?

[Joshua Cutchen]

That's, that's. That's the eternal debate, right? That's the eternal.

[Interviewer]

Because Eric will say that's just you giving yourself a pat on the back.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And so I think that retrocausality is in there. But that's when I would invoke the sort of earlier discussion that we had about the center of that time loop is the ex nihilo. And for me, ex nihilo is the creative act.

[Interviewer]

I'm with you there.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It is the spoken word. It is. And narrative. And I think narrative and sacrifice runs everything. Like, it really starts to feel that way the older I get.

[Interviewer]

The muse doesn't feel like me when it's there. It feels very different. I don't know if you experienced that.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I think.

[Interviewer]

I mean, look, you said channeling.

[Joshua Cutchen]

The best thing that I've ever composed was when I was, you know, shit faced. So, I mean, which is here. I mean, like, Tom Waits wrestled with this because he's like, you know, you get to a certain point when you get. Because he got sober, and he's like, you'll get to a certain point. You're like, well, what if, like, how much of this is me and how much is the sauce? You know?

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

So again, I think it's not an either or proposition. But. But, yeah. But, yeah, there is a sense that it's almost more akin to possession.

[Host]

Yes.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And if you've ever been in a flow state, it's the kind of the same way, like, I listen back to me like, look, don't get me wrong, I got plenty of bad solos that are all across the Internet. Okay. Bad bass lines, bad. All sorts of stuff. But every now and then I'll listen to something, I'll be like, that was not me. Like, it's me playing it, but that was not me. You know, and sports figures will talk about the same thing. So there seems to be an interplay. I want to talk about Predator and Bigfoot here in a minute, but let's put a pin in that, because I opened this whole conversation with trying to find a, again, a logical exemption for. For. For Crash Retrievals. In a world, in a reality where this possibly is what's going on, where the phenomenon is listening to us and adopting aspects of our fictions. And there are plenty that I list in the book. I'm not going to go through them right now, but in a reality where the phenomenon is adopting aspects of our fictions, what do we make of Crash Retrievals? Like, what would you make of a blood sample from John Constantine?

[Interviewer]

Right, right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Or. Or a bit of Mjolnir? What would that look like? It would. Would it come back with, like, oh, isotopes we can't make, materials we can't create on Earth. Is that what it would look like? I don't know. But it gives me some wiggle room, I think. And I'm more of the opinion now. There's a great book called Illuminations, I believe it is by Eric Wallet that talks about, among other things, the possibility that some UFO phenomena are mass formation Poltergeist events. As we've alluded to, Poltergeist seem to be as much a product of the human psyche as they are ghosts. Right.

[Interviewer]

And that's kind of a Keel interpretation.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It is while that makes a great point that a lot of that falling leaf motion that you see in UFO accounts again and again is exactly the way that a ports fall from the ceiling in poltergeist events. And there's already, as we've sort of mentioned, as Dr. Valley said, a connection between Poltergeist and UFOs. Poltergeist supports this, that the other. I'm not sure that crash retrieval isn't. And even bodies maybe, I'm not sure that they're not more akin to a ports by which I mean how do we distinguish these things that come from somewhere else, another dimension and manifest fully formed. How do we distinguish those from something that just wasn't in our reality? There's this great bit of research by Dr. Steve Mira who was working on a longitudinal poltergeist case.

[Interviewer]

What's a longitudinal.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It's just overtime.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Not like a one off. Right.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And there was a mug from a set that I deported. Now we have to sort of. We have to sort of go into this with some. Except expectations that there is a control group and that the mugs had been microwaved. Whatever. Let's. I'm acknowledging that, but he did a some tests on the mug that was a ported or disappointed rather the mug that vanished and came back. And he compared them to the control that had not been reported to do that. And he noticed changes in the molecular composition. No, now I know, I know the audience is wanting me to be more specific. I'm crap at chemistry and crap at science. It's in fourth wall phantoms, but changes in the millisieverts and changes in it was slightly more radioactive and had been subjected to heat, if memory serves. Okay.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Joshua Cutchen]

The point is again those details, I know I'm fudging on them, but the point is, is that he studied in a port at the molecular level and said that it looked different, it had somehow changed, which to him brought up a Couple of questions. Did the mug change when it came back, or is it even the same mug? Is this an imposter mug?

[Interviewer]

Right, right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And yet we see things when we do these analyses of metamaterials. Right. Where there's molecular compositions and isotopes that we can't explain. Right. So are we in a port territory? I don't know. The other thing that really gets to me and that I think is really worth commenting on, is you familiar with the phenomenon of angel hair?

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Joshua Cutchen]

So for anybody who doesn't know ectoplasm, it's ectoplasm. I don't know. Thank you for making that connection. So angel hair was used to hear about it a lot in the aftermath of. Of sightings. In the UFO sightings in the 50s and 60s, this wispy kind of stuff that would fall to the ground or be found at landing sites. You put it in a jar and it would evaporate. And if you look into reports of ectoplasm from mediums and seances, it would supposedly this gauzy, wispy material that would come out of orifices, and if it was collected in a jar, it would evaporate. Is that. Is it the same thing? I don't know. And I'm not. I don't have a jar of either one on my desk. And if I did, apparently it would have evaporated.

[Interviewer]

But it won't let you measure. It won't let you.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Right. Right. What is that? There's another great example, too, the saga of the green Stone, which is it was basically like LARPing.

[Interviewer]

Yep.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Where they would get these dreams about having this fabled philosopher's stone, basically that was a green stone. And they would gotten in this. Into this giant mythology about the Gunpowder Plot and a. Historical facts about how this green stone and this small sword and this casket all featured into it. But then people who are tangentially associated with it were having dreams about the locations for these things, and they followed up on them. They actually found, like, they can show you the green stone and the sword and stuff. And I don't know what that is because I'm listening to the historians and they're saying, like, none of this ever happened. And it sounds like it's. It's a. It's a. It's a whole rabbit hole that I encourage people to check out this. This British phenomenon of psychic questing.

[Interviewer]

Could this be the Philip experiment?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, I think it's. I think it's souvenirs of the imaginal. Right. I think it's souvenirs from that other space. And.

[Interviewer]

Well, it's Philip experiment is they create a character, right?

[Joshua Cutchen]

It's something being created from. From whole cloth.

[Interviewer]

Right. And they know it's fake, and yet they still summon. They do a sands.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And this still thing about the Phil. The thing about the green stone stuff, though, is that, like, we've got the actual thing. We've got the actual object that you can see and hold and handle, which is like saints, relics, fairy boots, fairy flags, and yet we put the UFO crash material over here. We separate it from all that. Do we have bodies? I don't know. And that would be a very extreme version of what I'm talking about. Yes, but if reality is getting this weird, I don't know that that's not the case. Now, to your point, the Philip Experiment, which I think is really important, a group of Toronto psychologists decided to create a ghost from whole cloth. And they came up with a believable backstory for him. Philip Aylesford, a spy in the English Civil War, gave him all the things that you would expect from someone in that time period. Highlights and lowlights of his life. And then they started asking questions and asking for responses back in the form of raps and such. And whatever they were asking questions of was correctly answering questions about Philip's fictional backstory is that. Did they actually create something? Tulpa thought form? I don't know. Was it another spirit that was listening in that was being a trickster and, you know, being like, oh, yeah, I'm Philip. Or was it a part of them that was projected out? I don't know. But this is. This is sort of the. The message behind so much of so much occultism is that you can. If you. If you. If you play act stuff enough, you can kind of make things happen.

[Interviewer]

Like. Like moving the. The Ouija board around.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, yeah, like moving the Ouija board. Or, you know, I mean, if you look at, like, a lot of ceremonial magic, they're dressing up in a robe and they're saying to the spirits that they are Solomon and they're holding. They got props. It's theater, right? It's theater, and people get results.

[Interviewer]

If you look at, like, ceremonies or theater.

[Joshua Cutchen]

John Sabal, Dr. John Sabal, has been doing work with rec. Period dress and period customs and period props and period phrases and talking to sort of coax out ghosts, reenactors and ghosts. And he's gotten some success with that as well. It's almost like the act of, like, pretending gets these things. It's this thing on the other side of the veil. To respond.

[Interviewer]

You mentioned tulpas. Could you get into that real fast? Because it's important. Because that's.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Foundation.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It is, it is. And I kind of, I have to sort of. It's one of those things you ever under these things that you like. You're like, yeah, it could be that. But I really don't like it as much as I feel like I should, you know. So the idea of the Tulpa is supposedly the idea that through enough concentrated dedication and thought you can make manifest a thought. Right. The famous example comes from Alexander David Neal who in Tibet claimed that she manifested a mischievous monk. And for a while she thought just she could see it. But there were some. There was some physical contact and eventually others started seeing it as well. She alluded to the fact that it possibly got out of her control and she had to again, through extensive con. Concentration, make it dissipate the idea of a thought form or an egregore. I would think of egregores as that in the more collective level. Right.

[Interviewer]

Yep. That's Jungian.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It's more of a. It's actually sort of. Egregore is derived out of the watchers.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Is what that is. But I think that you could make some real strong comparisons. I don't know if Jung ever really mentioned the word egregore. He might have, but you can draw some comparisons between that sort of collective expression. I don't know if I believe. If I believe in tobas or not. I have. I wish I could remember who said this to me. I had a friend tell me one time. Friend of a friend. Right. Friend of a friend got a, an appointment with a high ranking llama and goes in to this private meeting and is so excited to ask about Tulpas. And he sits down, he asked the question, can you tell me more about the creation of Tulpas? Goes through the translator. Answer comes back, it says he doesn't know you're talking about. Oh no, it's like so. And, and there are some, there's some illusions to this that, that the Tulpa, the idea of the Tulpa is. While the idea of thought forms you see everywhere. It's obviously the, the driving mechanism behind occultism. Right. The idea. There's some indications that Tulpa is just cultural appropriation all the way down. It's just theosophy. I mean like so, so, so much of what you talk about on the Y files is theosophy. You know that, Right. I Do so much is theosophy. It's, it's, it's influenced.

[Host]

I should have a picture of the boxes.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I mean, yeah, it's, it's, it's. I, I make the joke that, that paranormal studies nowadays are just theosophy and James Shelby downer. So much of that is downstream from that. So. Yeah, I don't know. But I think that ties into this idea. I think, I think the. If the trappings of it, like, oh, this mystical Eastern secret. If the trappings aren't accurate. The idea is something that, that has been talked about a lot.

[Interviewer]

Well, the reason I wanted to talk about it is tulpas are manifestation through concentration. You scale that up to global, and now you've got John Keel's interpretation of manifestation. And then the bodies in the crash retrieval. Is that just manifestation?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. And the thing, the other thing. I'm going to come back to that. The other thing I want to say about tulpas that doesn't sit well with me is like, I prefer to think that, like, you didn't make that monk, Alexandra. Like, that monk was always there, right, Waiting for you to. Yeah, yeah. I think that you're onto something with that. This idea of. And again, it's not saying that this is necessarily all. Even us. It's. There's. There's something that's interacting with us and listening and it's in this. There are time loops, there are culture loops. You know, there are culture influence loops in the phenomenon too. But, you know, we see a ghost train and we don't try to like, get a cog from the ghost train. But if you did, what would it look like? Right? You see, you smell ghost perfume and you're not like, well, I'm gonna bottle the ghost perfume. So, you know, I really don't know. So where I've landed with a lot of this stuff is that when I wake up in the morning, I guess some part of me psychic, I've thought that I'm dead as a doornail. But when I wake up in the morning, I'm not thinking about astral traveling or any of this stuff. Like, I want. I want breakfast. You know, I want to go to the bathroom and get breakfast. So, like, how much of me is psychic? 20 80. But there's a. But there's a part of me we can say, like, you know, let's playfully agree that, sure, a part of us is psychic. 80. 20. What if these other phenomena are 20 80.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

So they have that physical. Just as I can step into that psychic Space and do things in that psychic space. Or I could if I actually had an aptitude or the time and training. Maybe these things are mostly in that psychic space, but can step over into this physical space and then leave burn marks in the ground and leave scoop marks in your hands, you know, and one of the things, when I wrote where the footprints. And we started our conversation about Bigfoot, one of the biggest pushbacks that Tim Renner and I got was, well, ghost only footprints. It's like, you ever read your early parapsychology? Because that was like one of the first ghost hunting methods was to spread talcum powder on the floor and wait for footprints to manifest. So we have something backwards about this physical, non physical thing. Right? And I think that. That we shouldn't be thinking in terms of. Well, Jung would say we shouldn't be thinking about that in terms of physical, non physical at all. Because at the psychoid level, you go deep enough, like, material and psyche are not distinguishable. It's only they sort of as they ascend that chain that they become distinguished. But the thing that I would. I would say is that we should stop looking at these questions as physical, psychic, as internal, external, as mental, embodied, and honestly, maybe even fact, fiction. Like, maybe that's that same dichotomy that we see. The psychic, physical dichotomy is that fiction, fact, thing.

[Interviewer]

And does that mean Constantine was always there?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Maybe. You know, maybe. I would say what it definitely would mean to me is that just as well, let me think about this, because I had a thought and I completely lost it. I would have to say that maybe Constantine was always there. I don't know. I mean, I don't want to deprive too much of our agency, you know, because I just pushed back against Tulpa's being.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. You know, my gut goes there, though.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Both. And, you know, and it sounds like wiggle room or sounds like I'm being weaselly, right? Both. And. But.

[Interviewer]

But creative people understand this.

[Joshua Cutchen]

A lot of things in life are both. Both hand.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Like, I. I wound up in my worst situations in my life because I wasn't both ending. You know, I was either oring. So that might be part of what we're. Might be part of what we're seeing here.

[Interviewer]

So Valet says something's controlling it. Keel says we're controlling it. Who's right?

[Joshua Cutchen]

We are the other. I mean, and this is.

[Interviewer]

It's the only answer. I guess I started.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I started by saying I was a mystic, right? Like, but, but. But that's. That's really what you do sort of trace back into. I mentioned that sort of psychoid layer. And. But that's also the lesson of. Of something like monism. You know, the idea that the internal and the external are two sides of the same coin. It's also the idea, I would argue, you know, idealism, panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is in everything. And idealism would be the idea that everything is in consciousness. And if everything's in consciousness and there really aren't distinctions between us and the other. And, you know, I don't know how literal we can. We can take any of this. It's all. It's always speculative,

[Interviewer]

ignoring your research, not an academic answer. I just want to know what you think happens when. When we die.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Very simple question you throw in my way. I would have to say that I had. I have a very distinct memory of growing up in a church where there was a Sunday school lesson that really terrified someone. And it was part of the lesson was it evolved into a place where the Sunday school teacher basically said, I think when you get to heaven, you might not even recognize your family. Which for a child is a terrifying thing to say. Like, you might as well be saying that there's nothing. Right.

[Interviewer]

Yep.

[Joshua Cutchen]

But I'm not sure that that's not the case now. You know, 41 years into my life. I think that if you look at how so many of these experiences point towards things like ego, death, point towards, again, that. That idea of monism that I just mentioned, that idea of one, you know, oneness. You can go through, experience your accounts with UFOs, and you'll read things like, I am one with the one, that is all, and I am the. The mean, I am the me within the. And like, these weird, like, spiritual phrases. But they do point back to that sort of, like, lack of distinction between things. And I think that does mean that points to. Suggests. Raises the possibility that when you die, it is like a river going to the sea and you end up mixing up and matching and you don't really care. Just like I don't care about, like, my sons are obsessed with Legos. If I took away their Legos, they'd be distraught. But is. Are they gonna feel that way in 30 or 40 years? I mean, they might, but. But you take my point. Like, the things that I care about now and place value on now at this point in my life are so different than as a child. I cannot. I can only imagine what. How differently I would treat the stuff on the other side of the veil compared to the things that are important to me now.

[Interviewer]

I had never considered heaven as the same as oblivion before, but that's what it sounds like.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, and that's terrifying. But would you care once you reach that point?

[Interviewer]

No. But is this compatible with soul groups? Is this compatible with reincarnation?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Well, that's why I like sort of invoking the water cycle is because, you know, the after, after the river goes to the sea, some of that evaporates from the top and you get bits of a molecule that fell in Bangladesh and you get bits of a molecule that fell in Perth and you get bits of a molecule that fell off the, you know, in Ecuador and they all come together in one raindrop that falls back to the earth as it becomes individuated again and falls back to earth and eventually it's going to hit that river and come back to the ocean. Because the water cycle is, you know, a closed loop.

[Interviewer]

I tend to agree.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, but I. And so that's how you get pieces of people and maybe even, I mean, for the longest, a lot of, a lot of my work has been pushing into areas where I'm really uncomfortable. My toes curl in my shoes and all the bad ways when I hear people talking about pre birth memories with the ETs and reincarnation in these narratives, it's like, oh, I don't know what to do with that. But because I feel felt that way, I wanted to go there and you know, if. Let's have our cake and eat it too. Yeah, there are ets and yeah, their souls mix up in that same cosmic soup to evaporate and fall back down with us. So you could be part Zebel Ganubian.

[Interviewer]

You know, I'm uncomfortable with it, but I can't disprove it.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I don't, I mean, again, again it's, it's all speculative. I mean anybody who ever listens to me for hard facts, despite all my, despite all my endnotes, everything at the end of the day that I talk about is speculative. And I think it's just, I think there's so much that's rewarding in the speculation about these topics, like the idea, the binary of does this exist or not. As you can tell, I just blew right past it. Like that's just because we've been doing, we've been at this in the UFO question, I mean, obviously for a lot, arguably for a lot longer, but in the UFO case we've been doing this for like coming up on 80 years and we still haven't Settled that binary question. So let's go ahead and say, okay, let's assume that they are what. What can we learn? Like, what. What. What is this pointing us towards? And I think that's such a more interesting place to go. And I think that's also a place where we can meet the skeptics. I have so many skeptic friends who will still say to me, like, even if this stuff is bunk, it's important because it tells us about the way that we metabolize perceived contact with the other. It tells us about humanity. It tells us about ourselves. And that's. That's. That's valuable no matter who you are. I think it tells you something about what it is to be a human being.

[Interviewer]

You mentioned that it's fascinating that you're drawn to these ideas that are on the threshold of comfort. And I'm thinking that as we get more comfortable with certain notions, we keep pushing it, meaning we've got flying sauces we're uncomfortable with. Then we got grays, and then it's like they're just grays. And we keep moving. We keep moving. Now it's just retrieval. We get it. But now we're into AI and now we're scared.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Is the new trickster.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It's kind of the Shell Drake thing, right? Like, yes. Or it's, you know, addiction has been a theme running through this. It's like developing a new tolerance. Like, you know.

[Interviewer]

Exactly. Tolerance.

[Joshua Cutchen]

I mean, you've experienced this, I'm sure, in this space where it's like, you've. You're like, yeah, okay, you're taken by aliens. Yeah. You saw a Bigfoot, like, whatever. Like, give me more. Give me more.

[Interviewer]

Right, right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. And so I think that that just makes perfect sense that that would happen on the. On the societal level, too. And I think it's a really interesting time to be into these topics for a lot of different reasons. I mean, again, I'm. I've been eating a lot of crow about the way that I've talked about the disclosure movement historically, because, like, nothing's going to happen. Well, something's happening. I'm not sure of how useful it is. I'm not sure how revealing it is. But this is different than other disclosure seasons, because they come in seasons. But it's also been interesting to be alive when the UFO phenomenon has gone through another one of these costume changes. I promise I'll get back to the AI question. But, you know, for years we had signs and wonders in the sky and chariots and such. And then, as Dr. Vallejo has pointed out, you'll end up with airships in the early 20th century and flying saucers and the black triangles. And I said, as soon as the. The 2017 Red Pill Junkie, if you're watching this, I said this. I said, as soon as the Tic Tac video dropped, I said, okay, we're going to start seeing a conflation. Drones are the new UFO shape, right?

[Interviewer]

Yep.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And he said, yeah, but people aren't really reporting drones. And I said, nope, it's going to happen. And then the New Jersey drone flap happened. And I'm not saying that any of that was necessarily anomalous. It might have been. I really don't know. I'm agnostic on it. But the point is, how many news stories have you seen since then that conflate drones and UFOs, mystery drones seen over this Air Force? So I think it's. We have been present for something that is a generational thing where the UFO has said, oh, that's. That's a cool. That's a cool one. I'm going to start wearing that now. Having said that, that's the case with craft shapes, but the occupants seem to have done that over the years as well. It's that passport to Magonia drawing. I was talking about the demons and the fairies and the aliens. We're way overdue for a, For a mass change. And I wonder if we have this conversation in the next 15 or 20 years, if we wouldn't be saying, you know, the, the, the AI robots came out of their underground server farms to harvest my genetic code and then took it back in their, Their, Their drones, back to their server. Server farm. Like, is. Is AI going to be the new

[Interviewer]

mask that this 5149, it goes down like that?

[Joshua Cutchen]

I think so. Well, 5149, it goes down literally like that.

[Interviewer]

Literally like that.

[Joshua Cutchen]

But, yeah,

[Interviewer]

AI hallucinations sound like lies where you can ask the AI question, it will just tell you fully, confidently the answer. That's totally false.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Did you see the goblin bit?

[Interviewer]

No.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Some of these LLMs have been specifically asked multiple times on the back end to not bring up goblins unless specifically directive.

[Interviewer]

What?

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah. And for someone like me, I love that because it's like, does a sufficiently complex system invite in goblins? Does it sufficiently. And goblin as a metaphor. And goblin also is like, maybe the metaphor made manifest is what we're dealing with when we see actual goblins.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Joshua Cutchen]

But I just found that to be absolutely fascinating because that's an idea that, you know, some of my friends have talked about. It's like, you know, does. Does any sort of sufficiently complex system invite in consciousness in this sort of Promethean, Frankensteinian sort of way? I don't know, but it seems to invite in Goblins because it. Apparently there's some of these large language models that love bringing up goblins, even when you don't, to the extent that they had to, like, repeat numerous times, don't bring up goblins. That is. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Wow. You know? And why Goblins? Frankenstein and Prometheus, those. Those aren't happy endings.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Those stories never. Yes.

[Interviewer]

No. Before we go, for anyone who's new to your work, what do you want them to take away from it? It's very personal, even though it's. Well, research is very personal. You know, not. Not the book.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Yeah, I got it. I got it. I would encourage people to be comfortable with ambiguity. So I had a therapist one time was talking about the triangle being the most stable shape. Right. And how we like to think of things being settled on one plane, so where it's nice and stable and we have nice foundations. And if you flip a triangle up on its point, it's not stable at all, but there's the most chance to change, chance to pivot. Right. And inevitable. Inevitably, it has to happen. And I would encourage people to be more comfortable with sitting in that space, with not having what my mentor, Greg Bishop, calls a certainty fetish, with being able to look at things and be like, interesting if true. You know, an interesting. I have a big interesting of true basket in my head. The true basket is small and the false basket is small. But that interesting, if true basket is just overflowing.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Joshua Cutchen]

And you file stuff away and you say, okay, maybe this something will come of this someday, and maybe it won't. But I think what that does is that puts the things in your. It really places value on the things in your true basket. Right. Because so many things default to interesting if true. The things that are in your true basket are the things that you just know in the marrow of your bones. You know, it's. It's the relationships. I know it sounds cheesy, but it's the relationship.

[Interviewer]

It is.

[Joshua Cutchen]

It's. It's the importance of who you are. And what's really interesting is when stuff spills out of that interesting true basket and winds up in. In the true basket. And for me, the thing that I walk away with after doing all this stuff is that the fact that the map is not the territory in life is firmly in that true basket. And I don't know what collective story we're telling ourselves, but there is a better story to be told, and we have to start telling it or else it's never going to happen.

[Interviewer]

Well said, Josh Cutchen. We'll link to all your goodies down below. This has been fun.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Thank you so much.

[Interviewer]

Thanks for coming in.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Been a blast.

[Interviewer]

Bye everybody.

[Host]

That was Joshua Cutchen. We covered Ecology of souls, the fairy, UFO connection, fictional characters bleeding into reality, and why ChatGPT keeps generating goblins. So let's dig in. Here's what checks out. Jacques Vallee laid out the food exchange pattern and passport to Magonia in 1969. Ferries and UFO occupants offering food. The same structure across hundreds of cases spanning centuries. He didn't theorize it, he cataloged it. The Joe Simonton Pancake case, Eagle River, Wisconsin, 1961. A man claimed UFO occupants handed him four pancakes through an open hatch. The FDA tested them. They weren't space pancakes. They were regular pancakes made out of buckwheat flour. Okay, UFO drive thru. The Phillip experiment. That's real too. 1972, Toronto. A group led by Dr. George Owen invented a fictional ghost named Philip Aylesford. They gave him a backstory and tried to make contact. What happened was recorded before 50 witnesses and published in Conjuring up Philip by Iris owen, published in 1976. Rapping sounds that's knocking out like hip hop. Table levitation. The table moved toward people who tried to leave. They created something, they just didn't know what it was. They still don't. Alan Moore saw John Constantine in a London sandwich bar in Westminster. A man who looks looked exactly like Constantine. He made eye contact, he nodded, and then he walked off. Multiple other Hellblazer writers reported the same thing independently. Lots of writers have had this experience, but none can explain it now. The ChatGPT Goblin thing, that checks out too. OpenAI found that the model kept spontaneously generating goblins, gremlins and trolls, they explained. Explicitly trained it. Not to mention those things. It kept doing it anyway. PC World, NBC News, and Gizmodo all covered it. A system trained on the full weight of human imagination apparently has an addiction to goblins.

[Interviewer]

It's not a good sign.

[Host]

Jeffrey Kripal at Rice University endorsed Ecology of Souls and featured Cutcheon at the Archives of the Impossible conference in 2023. Whether it's for formerly on a first year PhD reading list, I couldn't pin that down. But when an academic of Kripal's standing calls your book Important in front of his peers. That matters. He's a serious, serious researcher. Josh's honeymoon story, whether he found a rock that looked like Bigfoot put it there or his wife found one that looked like a rabbit. You know, those stories have nothing really to do with the thesis, but somehow they fit the pattern that he spent 15 years tracking. A world arranging itself around whatever you're carrying. Emotionally, I don't know. It's hard to explain, but when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Now, of course, I can't prove those stories because they just. Josh is just telling them, but I have no reason to think he's lying. Fourth Wall Phantoms is Josh's new book. He's out right now. Grab it on Amazon if you're into those synchronicities. I've covered those in a few episodes. Episodes? If you like the Mothman story, That's the. We talked about John Keel a lot. That's the Mothman story. I think that's episode 141. That's on the channel. A lot of the stuff we talked about today you can find in the White Files library. Anyway, thanks to Josh for coming in. Thanks to you for hanging out. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

[Performer]

I play Philippius in Area 51 a secret code inside the Bible said I

[Joshua Cutchen]

was

[Performer]

I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music Song sang in the like I should but then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends and it never ends no, it never ends. I feel the crap cat I got stuck inside Mel's home with them Catch Hey, I don't drop being only 2

[Joshua Cutchen]

aware

[Performer]

did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set or were the shadow people there

[Joshua Cutchen]

The Roswell

[Performer]

aliens just fought the smiling man I'm told and his name was cold But I can't believe I'm dancing with the bitches and we'll fish on Thursday nights with a J2 and. Through the night. The Mothman sightings and the solar storm still come to Agatha the secret city underground Mysterious number stations Planet Surf 02 Project Stargate and what the dark watchers found. The Black Knight satellite. I'm dancing with the fish head the fish on Thursday night Wednesday J2 and the weapons.

[Joshua Cutchen]

Time.

[Performer]

Love to dance. To dance yeah, Ger love to dance on the dance floor because she is a camel and camels love to dance when the feeling is right Always in time. Sa.